The HTTP module now provides powerful Request Mapping support for Inbound Endpoints. Class UriPathHandlerMapping was replaced by IntegrationRequestMappingHandlerMapping, which is registered under the bean name integrationRequestMappingHandlerMapping in the application context. Upon parsing of the HTTP Inbound Endpoint, a new IntegrationRequestMappingHandlerMapping bean is either registered or an existing bean is being reused. To achieve flexible Request Mapping configuration, Spring Integration provides the <request-mapping/> sub-element for the <http:inbound-channel-adapter/> and the <http:inbound-gateway/>. Both HTTP Inbound Endpoints are now fully based on the Request Mapping infrastructure that was introduced with Spring MVC 3.1. For example, multiple paths are supported on a single inbound endpoint. For more information see Section 16.4, “HTTP Namespace Support”.

A new IntegrationEvaluationContextFactoryBean is provided to allow configuration of custom PropertyAccessors and functions for use in SpEL expressions throughout the framework. For more information see Appendix A, Spring Expression Language (SpEL).

To customize the SpEL EvaluationContext with static Method functions, the new <spel-function/> component is introduced. Two built-in functions are also provided (#jsonPath and #xpath). For more information see Section A.3, “SpEL Functions”.

To customize the SpEL EvaluationContext with PropertyAccessor implementations the new <spel-property-accessors/> component is introduced. For more information see Section A.4, “PropertyAccessors”.

A new Redis-based MetadataStore implementation has been added. The RedisMetadataStore can be used to maintain state of a MetadataStore across application restarts. This new MetadataStore implementation can be used with adapters such as:

New queue-based components have been added. The <int-redis:queue-inbound-channel-adapter/> and the <int-redis:queue-outbound-channel-adapter/> components are provided to perform 'right pop' and 'left push' operations on a Redis List, respectively.

For more information see Chapter 22, Redis Support.

It is now possible to instruct the framework to store reply and error channels in a registry for later resolution. This is useful for cases where the replyChannel or errorChannel might be lost; for example when serializing a message. See Section 6.2.2, “Header Enricher” for more information.

In addition to the existing eMongoDbMessageStore, a new ConfigurableMongoDbMessageStore has been introduced. This provides a more robust and flexible implementation of MessageStore for MongoDB. It does not have backward compatibility, with the existing store, but it is recommended to use it for new applications. Existing applications can use it, but messages in the old store will not be available. See Chapter 21, MongoDb Support for more information.

Building on the 2.2 SyslogToMapTransformer Spring Integration 3.0 now introduces UDP and TCP inbound channel adapters especially tailored for receiving SYSLOG messages. For more information, see Chapter 27, Syslog Support.

File 'tail'ing inbound channel adapters are now provided to generate messages when lines are added to the end of text files; see Section 13.2.1, “'Tail'ing Files”.

For more information, see Section 8.1, “JMX Support”.

TcpConnections now emit ApplicationEvents (specifically TcpConnectionEvents) when connections are opened, closed, or an exception occurs. This allows applications to be informed of changes to TCP connections using the normal Spring ApplicationListener mechanism.

AbstractTcpConnection has been renamed TcpConnectionSupport; custom connections that are subclasses of this class, can use its methods to publish events. Similarly, AbstractTcpConnectionInterceptor has been renamed to TcpConnectionInterceptorSupport.

In addition, a new <int-ip:tcp-connection-event-inbound-channel-adapter/> is provided; by default, this adapter sends all TcpConnectionEvents to a Channel.

Further, the TCP Connection Factories, now provide a new method getOpenConnectionIds(), which returns a list of identifiers for all open connections; this allows applications, for example, to broadcast to all open connections.

Finally, the connection factories also provide a new method closeConnection(String connectionId) which allows applications to explicitly close a connection using its ID.

For more information see Section 28.5, “TCP Connection Events”.

The <int:inbound-channel-adapter/> now supports <expression/> and <script/> sub-elements to create a MessageSource; see Section 3.3.3, “Channel Adapter Expressions and Scripts”.

The Content Enricher now provides configuration for <header/> sub-elements, to enrich the outbound Message with headers based on the reply Message from the underlying message flow. For more information see Section 6.2.3, “Payload Enricher”.

Previously, message ids were generated using the JDK UUID.randomUUID() method. With this release, the default mechanism has been changed to use a more efficient algorithm which is significantly faster. In addition, the ability to change the strategy used to generate message ids has been added. For more information see the section called “Message ID Generation”.

For more information see Section 7.2, “Messaging Gateways”.

For more information see Chapter 16, HTTP Support.

For more information, see 'JSON Transformers' in Section 6.1, “Transformer”.

Previously, the id attribute for elements within a <chain> was ignored and, in some cases, disallowed. Now, the id attribute is allowed for all elements within a <chain>. The bean names of chain elements is a combination of the surrounding chain's id and the id of the element itself. For example: 'fooChain$child.fooTransformer.handler'. For more information see Section 5.6, “Message Handler Chain”.

The AbstractCorrelatingMessageHandler provides a new property empty-group-min-timeout to allow empty group expiry to run on a longer schedule than expiring partial groups. Empty groups will not be removed from the MessageStore until they have not been modified for at least this number of milliseconds. For more information see Section 5.4.4, “Configuring an Aggregator”.

New FileListFilters that use a persistent MetadataStore are now available. These can be used to prevent duplicate files after a system restart. See Section 13.2, “Reading Files”, Section 14.3, “FTP Inbound Channel Adapter”, and Section 25.5, “SFTP Inbound Channel Adapter” for more information.

A new variables attribute has been introduced for scripting components. In addition, variable bindings are now allowed for inline scripts. See Section 7.6, “Groovy support” and Section 7.5, “Scripting support” for more information.

Previously, when configuring LoadBalancingStrategy on the channel's 'dispatcher' sub-element, the only available option was to use a pre-defined enumeration of values which did not allow one to set a custom implementation of the LoadBalancingStrategy. You can now use load-balancer-ref to provide a reference to a custom implementation of the LoadBalancingStrategy. For more information see the section called “DirectChannel”.

Previously, sending to a <publish-subscribe-channel/> that had no subscribers would return a false result. If used in conjunction with a MessagingTemplate, this would result in an exception being thrown. Now, the PublishSubscribeChannel has a property minSubscribers (default 0). If the message is sent to at least the minimum number of subscribers, the send is deemed to be successful (even if zero). If an application is expecting to get an exception under these conditions, set the minimum subscribers to at least 1.

The FTP, SFTP and FTPS endpoints no longer cache sessions by default

The deprecated cached-sessions attribute has been removed from all endpoints. Previously, the embedded caching mechanism controlled by this attribute's value didn't provide a way to limit the size of the cache, which could grow indefinitely. The CachingConnectionFactory was introduced in release 2.1 and it became the preferred (and is now the only) way to cache sessions.

The CachingConnectionFactory now provides a new method resetCache(). This immediately closes idle sessions and causes in-use sessions to be closed as and when they are returned to the cache.

The DefaultSftpSessionFactory (in conjunction with a CachingSessionFactory) now supports multiplexing channels over a single SSH connection (SFTP Only).

FTP, SFTP and FTPS Inbound Adapters

Previously, there was no way to override the default filter used to process files retrieved from a remote server. The filter attribute determines which files are retrieved but the FileReadingMessageSource uses an AcceptOnceFileListFilter. This means that if a new copy of a file is retrieved, with the same name as a previously copied file, no message was sent from the adapter.

With this release, a new attribute local-filter allows you to override the default filter, for example with an AcceptAllFileListFilter, or some other custom filter.

For users that wish the behavior of the AcceptOnceFileListFilter to be maintained across JVM executions, a custom filter that retains state, perhaps on the file system, can now be configured.

Inbound Channel Adapters now support the preserve-timestamp attribute, which sets the local file modified timestamp to the timestamp from the server (default false).

FTP, SFTP and FTPS Gateways

Remote File Template

A new higher-level abstraction (RemoteFileTemplate) is provided over the Session implementations used by the FTP and SFTP modules. While it is used internally by endpoints, this abstraction can also be used programmatically and, like all Spring *Template implementations, reliably closes the underlying session while allowing low level access to the session when needed.

For more information, see Chapter 14, FTP/FTPS Adapters and Chapter 25, SFTP Adapters.

All Outbound Gateways (e.g. <jdbc:outbound-gateway/> or <jms:outbound-gateway/>) are designed for 'request-reply' scenarios. A response is expected from the external service and will be published to the reply-channel, or the replyChannel message header. However, there are some cases where the external system might not always return a result, e.g. a <jdbc:outbound-gateway/>, when a SELECT ends with an empty ResultSet or, say, a Web Service is One-Way. An option is therefore needed to configure whether or not a reply is required. For this purpose, the requires-reply attribute has been introduced for Outbound Gateway components. In most cases, the default value for requires-reply is true and, if there is not any result, a ReplyRequiredException will be thrown. Changing the value to false means that, if an external service doesn't return anything, the message-flow will end at that point, similar to an Outbound Channel Adapter.

Note

The WebService outbound gateway has an additional attribute ignore-empty-responses; this is used to treat an empty String response as if no response was received. It is true by default but can be set to false to allow the application to receive an empty String in the reply message payload. When the attribute is true an empty string is treated as no response for the purposes of the requires-reply attribute. requires-reply is false by default for the WebService outbound gateway.

Note, the requiresReply property was previously present in the AbstractReplyProducingMessageHandler but set to false, and there wasn't any way to configure it on Outbound Gateways using the XML namespace.

	Important
	Previously, a gateway receiving no reply would silently end the flow (with a DEBUG log message); with this change an exception will now be thrown by default by most gateways. To revert to the previous behavior, set requires-reply to false.

Previously, the <int-amqp:outbound-gateway/> mapped headers before invoking the message converter, and the converter could overwrite headers such as content-type. The outbound adapter maps the headers after the conversion, which means headers like content-type from the outbound Message (if present) are used.

Starting with this release, the gateway now maps the headers after the message conversion, consistent with the adapter. If your application relies on the previous behavior (where the converter's headers overrode the mapped headers), you either need to filter those headers (before the message reaches the gateway) or set them appropriately. The headers affected by the SimpleMessageConverter are content-type and content-encoding. Custom message converters may set other headers.

For more complex database-specific types, not supported by the standard CallableStatement.getObject method, 2 new additional attributes were introduced to the <sql-parameter-definition/> element with OUT-direction:

The row-mapper attribute of the Stored Procedure Inbound Channel Adapter <returning-resultset/> sub-element now supports a reference to a RowMapper bean definition. Previously, it contained just a class name (which is still supported).

For more information see Section 17.5, “Stored Procedures”.

Web Service Outbound Gateway 'uri' attribute now supports <uri-variable/> substitution for all URI-schemes supported by Spring Web Services. For more information see Section 30.4, “Outbound URI Configuration”.

For more information, see Chapter 22, Redis Support.

Previously, when a <filter/> had a <request-handler-advice-chain/>, the discard action was all performed within the scope of the advice chain (including any downstream flow on the discard-channel). The filter element now has an attribute discard-within-advice (default true), to allow the discard action to be performed after the advice chain completes. See Section 7.7.4, “Advising Filters”.

Request Handler Advice Chains can now be configured using annotations. See Section 7.7.5, “Advising Endpoints Using Annotations”.

This transformer now correctly transforms byte[] and char[] payloads to String. For more information see Section 6.1, “Transformer”.

Payloads to persist or merge can now be of type java.lang.Iterable.

In that case, each object returned by the Iterable is treated as an entity and persisted or merged using the underlying EntityManager. NULL values returned by the iterator are ignored.

The JPA adapters now have additional attributes to optionally 'flush' and 'clear' entities from the associated persistence context after performing persistence operations.

Retrieving gateways had no mechanism to specify the first record to be retrieved which is a common use case. The retrieving gateways now support specifying this parameter using a first-result and first-result-expression attributes to the gateway definition. Section 18.6.3, “Retrieving Outbound Gateway”.

The JPA retrieving gateway and inbound adapter now have an attribute to specify the maximum number of results in a result set as an expression. In addition, the max-results attribute has been introduced to replace max-number-of-results, which has been deprecated. max-results and max-results-expression are used to provide the maximum number of results, or an expression to compute the maximum number of results, respectively, in the result set.

For more information see Chapter 18, JPA Support.

Previously, the <delayer> provided a delay-header-name attribute to determine the delay value at runtime. In complex cases it was necessary to precede the <delayer> with a <header-enricher>. Spring Integration 3.0 introduced the expression attribute and expression sub-element for dynamic delay determination. The delay-header-name attribute is now deprecated because the header evaluation can be specified in the expression. In addition, the ignore-expression-failures was introduced to control the behavior when an expression evaluation fails. For more information see Section 7.4, “Delayer”.

Spring Integration 3.0 adds a new set of DDL scripts for MySQL version 5.6.4 and higher. Now MySQL supports fractional seconds and is thus improving the FIFO ordering when polling from a MySQL-based Message Store. For more information, please see Section 17.4.1, “The Generic JDBC Message Store”.

Previously, if an IMAP idle connection failed, it was logged but there was no mechanism to inform an application. Such exceptions now generate ApplicationEvents. Applications can obtain these events using an <int-event:inbound-channel-adapter> or any ApplicationListener configured to receive an ImapIdleExceptionEvent or one of its super classes.

The TCP connection factories now enable the configuration of a flexible mechanism to transfer selected headers (as well as the payload) over TCP. A new TcpMessageMapper enables the selection of the headers, and an appropriate (de)serializer needs to be configured to write the resulting Map to the TCP stream. A MapJsonSerializer is provided as a convenient mechanism to transfer headers and payload over TCP. For more information see Section 28.8.4, “Transferring Headers”.

Previously, when configuring a <message-driven-channel-adapter/>, if you wished to use a specific TaskExecutor, it was necessary to declare a container bean and provide it to the adapter using the container attribute. The task-executor is now provided, allowing it to be set directly on the adapter. This is in addition to several other container attributes that were already available.

The RMI Inbound Gateway now supports an error-channel attribute. See Section 24.3, “Inbound RMI”.

You can now specify the transformer factory class name using the transformer-factory-class attribute. See the section called “XsltPayloadTransformer”