The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a simple network protocol which allows you to transfer files between two computers on the Internet.

There are two actors when it comes to FTP communication: client and server. To transfer files with FTP/FTPS, you use a client which initiates a connection to a remote computer that is running an FTP server. After the connection is established, the client can choose to send and/or receive copies of files.

Spring Integration supports sending and receiving files over FTP/FTPS by providing two types of client side adapters: Inbound Channel Adapter and Outbound Channel Adapter. It also provides convenient namespace-based configuration options for defining these client components.

To use the FTP namespace, add the following to the header of your XML file:

xmlns:ftp="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/ftp"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/ftp 
	http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/ftp/spring-integration-ftp-2.0.xsd" 

Before configuring FTP adapters you must configure an FTP Session Factory. You can configure the FTP Session Factory with a regular bean definition where the implementation class is org.springframework.integration.ftp.session.DefaultFtpSessionFactory: Below is a basic configuration:

<bean id="ftpClientFactory" 
	class="org.springframework.integration.ftp.session.DefaultFtpSessionFactory">
		<property name="host" value="localhost"/>
		<property name="port" value="22"/>
		<property name="username" value="kermit"/>
		<property name="password" value="frog"/>
		<property name="clientMode" value="0"/>
		<property name="fileType" value="2"/>
		<property name="bufferSize" value="100000"/>
</bean>

For FTPS connections all you need to do is use org.springframework.integration.ftp.session.DefaultFtpsSessionFactory instead. Below is the complete configuration sample:

<bean id="ftpClientFactory" 
	class="org.springframework.integration.ftp.client.DefaultFtpsClientFactory">
		<property name="host" value="localhost"/>
		<property name="port" value="22"/>
		<property name="username" value="oleg"/>
		<property name="password" value="password"/>
		<property name="clientMode" value="1"/>
		<property name="fileType" value="2"/>
		<property name="useClientMode" value="true"/>
		<property name="cipherSuites" value="a,b.c"/>
		<property name="keyManager" ref="keyManager"/>
		<property name="protocol" value="SSL"/>
		<property name="trustManager" ref="trustManager"/>
		<property name="prot" value="P"/>
		<property name="needClientAuth" value="true"/>
		<property name="authValue" value="oleg"/>
		<property name="sessionCreation" value="true"/>
		<property name="protocols" value="SSL, TLS"/>
		<property name="implicit" value="true"/>
</bean>

Every time an adapter requests a session object from its SessionFactory the session is returned from a session pool maintained by a caching wrapper around the factory. A Session in the session pool might go stale (if it has been disconnected by the server due to inactivity) so the SessionFactory will perform validation to make sure that it never returns a stale session to the adapter. If a stale session was encountered, it will be removed from the pool, and a new one will be created.

Now all you need to do is inject these session factories into your adapters. Obviously the protocol (FTP or FTPS) that an adapter will use depends on the type of session factory that has been injected into the adapter.

The FTP Inbound Channel Adapter is a special listener that will connect to the FTP server and will listen for the remote directory events (e.g., new file created) at which point it will initiate a file transfer.

<int-ftp:inbound-channel-adapter id="ftpInbound"
				channel="ftpChannel" 
				session-factory="ftpSessionFactory"
				charset="UTF-8"
				auto-create-local-directory="true"
				delete-remote-files="true"
				filename-pattern="*.txt"
				remote-directory="some/remote/path"
				remote-file-separator="/"
				local-directory=".">
			<int:poller fixed-rate="1000"/>
</int-ftp:inbound-channel-adapter>

As you can see from the configuration above you can configure an FTP Inbound Channel Adapter via the inbound-channel-adapter element while also providing values for various attributes such as local-directory, filename-pattern (which is based on simple pattern matching, not regular expressions), and of course the reference to a session-factory.

Some times file filtering based on the simple pattern specified via filename-pattern attribute might not be sufficient. If this is the case, you can use the filename-regex attribute to specify a Regular Expression (e.g. filename-regex=".*\.test$"). And of course if you need complete control you can use filter attribute and provide a reference to any custom implementation of the org.springframework.integration.file.filters.FileListFilter, a strategy interface for filtering a list of files.

Please refer to the schema for more details on these attributes.

It is also important to understand that the FTP Inbound Channel Adapter is a Polling Consumer and therefore you must configure a poller (either via a global default or a local sub-element). Once a file has been transferred, a Message with a java.io.File as its payload will be generated and sent to the channel identified by the channel attribute.

More on File Filtering and Large Files

Some times the file that just appeared in the monitored (remote) directory is not complete. Typically such a file will be written with temporary extension (e.g., foo.txt.writing) and then renamed after the writing process finished. As a user in most cases you are only interested in files that are complete and would like to filter only files that are complete. To handle these scenarios you can use the filtering support provided by the filename-pattern, filename-regex and filter attributes. Here is an example that uses a custom Filter implementation.

<int-ftp:inbound-channel-adapter 
			channel="ftpChannel" 
			session-factory="ftpSessionFactory"
			filter="customFilter"
			local-directory="file:/my_transfers">
			remote-directory="some/remote/path"
	<int:poller fixed-rate="1000"/>
</int-ftp:inbound-channel-adapter>
	
<bean id="customFilter" class="org.example.CustomFilter"/>

Poller configuration notes for the inbound FTP adapter

The job of the inbound FTP adapter consists of two tasks: 1) Communicate with a remote server in order to transfer files from a remote directory to a local directory. 2) For each transferred file, generate a Message with that file as a payload and send it to the channel identified by the 'channel' attribute. That is why they are called 'channel-adapters' rather than just 'adapters'. The main job of such an adapter is to generate a Message to be sent to a Message Channel. Essentially, the second task mentioned above takes precedence in such a way that *IF* your local directory already has one or more files it will first generate Messages from those, and *ONLY* when all local files have been processed, will it initiate the remote communication to retrieve more files.

Also, when configuring a trigger on the poller you should pay close attention to the max-messages-per-poll attribute. Its default value is 1 for all SourcePollingChannelAdapter instances (including FTP). This means that as soon as one file is processed, it will wait for the next execution time as determined by your trigger configuration. If you happened to have one or more files sitting in the local-directory, it would process those files before it would initiate communication with the remote FTP server. And, if the max-messages-per-poll were set to 1 (default), then it would be processing only one file at a time with intervals as defined by your trigger, essentially working as one-poll = one-file.

For typical file-transfer use cases, you most likely want the opposite behavior: to process all the files you can for each poll and only then wait for the next poll. If that is the case, set max-messages-per-poll to -1. Then, on each poll, the adapter will attempt to generate as many Messages as it possibly can. In other words, it will process everything in the local directory, and then it will connect to the remote directory to transfer everything that is available there to be processed locally. Only then is the poll operation considered complete, and the poller will wait for the next execution time.

You can alternatively set the 'max-messages-per-poll' value to a positive value indicating the upward limit of Messages to be created from files with each poll. For example, a value of 10 means that on each poll it will attempt to process no more than 10 files.

The FTP Outbound Channel Adapter relies upon a MessageHandler implementation that will connect to the FTP server and initiate an FTP transfer for every file it receives in the payload of incoming Messages. It also supports several representations of the File so you are not limited only to java.io.File typed payloads. The FTP Outbound Channel Adapter supports the following payloads: 1) java.io.File - the actual file object; 2) byte[] - a byte array that represents the file contents; and 3) java.lang.String - text that represents the file contents.

<int-ftp:outbound-channel-adapter id="ftpOutbound"
				channel="ftpChannel" 
				session-factory="ftpSessionFactory"
				charset="UTF-8"
				remote-file-separator="/"
				filename-generator="fileNameGenerator"/>

As you can see from the configuration above you can configure an FTP Outbound Channel Adapter via the outbound-channel-adapter element while also providing values for various attributes such as filename-generator (an implementation of the org.springframework.integration.file.FileNameGenerator strategy interface), a reference to a client-factory, as well as other attributes. Please refer to the schema for more details on the available attributes.