Spring Integration's File support extends the Spring Integration Core with a dedicated vocabulary to deal with reading, writing, and transforming files. It provides a namespace that enables elements defining Channel Adapters dedicated to files and support for Transformers that can read file contents into strings or byte arrays.
This section will explain the workings of FileReadingMessageSource
and FileWritingMessageHandler
and how to configure them as
beans. Also the support for dealing with files through file specific
implementations of Transformer
will be discussed. Finally the
file specific namespace will be explained.
A FileReadingMessageSource
can be used to consume files from the filesystem.
This is an implementation of MessageSource
that creates messages from
a file system directory.
<bean id="pollableFileSource" class="org.springframework.integration.file.FileReadingMessageSource" p:inputDirectory="${input.directory}"/>
To prevent creating messages for certain files, you may supply a
FileListFilter
. By default, an
AcceptOnceFileListFilter
is used. This filter
ensures files are picked up only once from the directory.
<bean id="pollableFileSource" class="org.springframework.integration.file.FileReadingMessageSource" p:inputDirectory="${input.directory}" p:filter-ref="customFilterBean"/>
A common problem with reading files is that a file may be detected before
it is ready. The default AcceptOnceFileListFilter
does not prevent this. In most cases, this can be prevented if the
file-writing process renames each file as soon as it is ready for
reading. A filename-pattern or filename-regex filter that accepts only files that are
ready (e.g. based on a known suffix), composed with the default
AcceptOnceFileListFilter
allows for this.
The CompositeFileListFilter
enables the
composition.
<bean id="pollableFileSource" class="org.springframework.integration.file.FileReadingMessageSource" p:inputDirectory="file:${input.directory}" p:filter-ref="compositeFilter"/> <bean id="compositeFilter" class="org.springframework.integration.file.filters.CompositeFileListFilter"> <constructor-arg> <list> <bean class="org.springframework.integration.file.filters.AcceptOnceFileListFilter" /> <bean class="org.springframework.integration.file.filters.RegexPatternFileListFilter"> <constructor-arg value="^test.*$"/> </bean> </list> </constructor-arg> </bean>
The configuration can be simplified using the file specific namespace. To do this use the following template.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:integration="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration" xmlns:file="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/file" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration-2.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/file http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/file/spring-integration-file-2.0.xsd"> </beans>
Within this namespace you can reduce the FileReadingMessageSource and wrap it in an inbound Channel Adapter like this:
<file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn1" directory="file:${input.directory}" prevent-duplicates="true"/> <file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn2" directory="file:${input.directory}" filter="customFilterBean" /> <file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn3" directory="file:${input.directory}" filename-pattern="test*" /> <file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn4" directory="file:${input.directory}" filename-regex="test[0-9]+\.txt" />
The first channel adapter is relying on the default filter that just prevents
duplication, the second is using a custom filter, the third is using the
filename-pattern attribute to add an AntPathMatcher
based filter, and the fourth is using the filename-regex attribute to add a
regular expression Pattern based filter to the FileReadingMessageSource
.
The filename-pattern and filename-regex attributes are
each mutually exclusive with the regular filter reference attribute. However,
you can use the filter attribute to reference an instance of
CompositeFileListFilter
that combines any number of filters, including one
or more pattern based filters to fit your particular needs.
When multiple processes are reading from the same directory it can be desirable to lock files to prevent
them from being picked up concurrently. To do this you can use a FileLocker
.
There is a java.nio based implementation available out of the box, but it is also possible to implement your
own locking scheme. The nio locker can be injected as follows
<file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn" directory="file:${input.directory}" prevent-duplicates="true"> <file:nio-locker/> </file:inbound-channel-adapter>
A custom locker you can configure like this:
<file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn" directory="file:${input.directory}" prevent-duplicates="true"> <file:locker ref="customLocker"/> </file:inbound-channel-adapter>
When filtering and locking files is not enough it might be needed to control the way files are listed entirely. To
implement this type of requirement you can use an implementation of DirectoryScanner
.
This scanner allows you to determine entirely what files are listed each poll. This is also the interface
that Spring Integration uses internally to wire FileListFilters FileLocker to the FileReadingMessageSource.
A custom DirectoryScanner can be injected into the <file:inbound-channel-adapter/> on the scanner
attribute.
<file:inbound-channel-adapter id="filesIn" directory="file:${input.directory}" prevent-duplicates="true" scanner="customDirectoryScanner"/>
This gives you full freedom to choose the ordering, listing and locking strategies.
To write messages to the file system you can use a
FileWritingMessageHandler
. This class can deal with
File, String, or byte array payloads. In its simplest form the
FileWritingMessageHandler
only requires a
destination directory for writing the files. The name of the file to be
written is determined by the handler's FileNameGenerator
.
The default implementation looks for a Message header whose key matches
the constant defined as FileHeaders.FILENAME
.
Additionally, you can configure the encoding and the charset that will be used in case of a String payload.
To make things easier you can configure the FileWritingMessageHandler as part of an outbound channel adapter using the namespace.
<file:outbound-channel-adapter id="filesOut" directory="${input.directory.property}"/>
The namespace based configuration also supports a delete-source-files
attribute.
If set to true
, it will trigger deletion of the original source files after writing
to a destination. The default value for that flag is false
.
<file:outbound-channel-adapter id="filesOut" directory="${output.directory}" delete-source-files="true"/>
![]() | Note |
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The |
In cases where you want to continue processing messages based on the written File you can use
the outbound-gateway
instead. It plays a very similar role as the
outbound-channel-adapter
. However after writing the File, it will also send it
to the reply channel as the payload of a Message.
<file:outbound-gateway id="mover" request-channel="moveInput" reply-channel="output" directory="${output.directory}" delete-source-files="true"/>
![]() | Note |
---|---|
The 'outbound-gateway' works well in cases where you want to first move a File and then send it through a processing pipeline. In such cases, you may connect the file namespace's 'inbound-channel-adapter' element to the 'outbound-gateway' and then connect that gateway's reply-channel to the beginning of the pipeline. |
If you have more elaborate requirements or need to support additional payload types as input
to be converted to file content you could extend the FileWritingMessageHandler, but a much
better option is to rely on a Transformer
.
To transform data read from the file system to objects and the other way around you need
to do some work. Contrary to FileReadingMessageSource
and to a
lesser extent FileWritingMessageHandler
, it is very likely that you
will need your own mechanism to get the job done. For this you can implement the
Transformer
interface. Or extend the
AbstractFilePayloadTransformer
for inbound messages. Some obvious
implementations have been provided.
FileToByteArrayTransformer
transforms Files into byte[]s using
Spring's FileCopyUtils
. It is often better to use a sequence of
transformers than to put all transformations in a single class. In that case the File to
byte[] conversion might be a logical first step.
FileToStringTransformer
will convert Files to Strings as the name
suggests. If nothing else, this can be useful for debugging (consider using with a Wire Tap).
To configure File specific transformers you can use the appropriate elements from the file namespace.
<file-to-bytes-transformer input-channel="input" output-channel="output" delete-files="true"/> <file:file-to-string-transformer input-channel="input" output-channel="output delete-files="true" charset="UTF-8"/>
The delete-files option signals to the transformer that it should delete
the inbound File after the transformation is complete. This is in no way a replacement for using the
AcceptOnceFileListFilter
when the FileReadingMessageSource is being used in a
multi-threaded environment (e.g. Spring Integration in general).