The HTTP support allows for the execution of HTTP requests and the processing of inbound HTTP requests. Because interaction over HTTP is always synchronous, even if all that is returned is a 200 status code, the HTTP support consists of two gateway implementations: HttpInboundEndpoint and HttpRequestExecutingMessageHandler.

To receive messages over HTTP, you need to use an HTTP Inbound Channel Adapter or Gateway. To support the HTTP Inbound Adapters, they need to be deployed within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat or Jetty. The easiest way to do this is to use Spring's HttpRequestHandlerServlet, by providing the following servlet definition in the web.xml file:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>inboundGateway</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>o.s.web.context.support.HttpRequestHandlerServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>

Notice that the servlet name matches the bean name. For more information on using the HttpRequestHandlerServlet, see chapter "Remoting and web services using Spring", which is part of the Spring Framework Reference documentation.

If you are running within a Spring MVC application, then the aforementioned explicit servlet definition is not necessary. In that case, the bean name for your gateway can be matched against the URL path just like a Spring MVC Controller bean. For more information, please see the chapter "Web MVC framework", which is part of the Spring Framework Reference documentation.

Below is an example bean definition for a simple HTTP inbound endpoint.

<bean id="httpInbound"
  class="org.springframework.integration.http.inbound.HttpRequestHandlingMessagingGateway">
  <property name="requestChannel" ref="httpRequestChannel" />
  <property name="replyChannel" ref="httpReplyChannel" />
</bean>

The HttpRequestHandlingMessagingGateway accepts a list of HttpMessageConverter instances or else relies on a default list. The converters allow customization of the mapping from HttpServletRequest to Message. The default converters encapsulate simple strategies, which for example will create a String message for a POST request where the content type starts with "text", see the Javadoc for full details. An additional flag (mergeWithDefaultConverters) can be set along with the list of custom HttpMessageConverter to add the default converters after the custom converters. By default this flag is set to false, meaning that the custom converters replace the default list.

Starting with Spring Integration 2.0, MultiPart File support is implemented. If the request has been wrapped as a MultipartHttpServletRequest, when using the default converters, that request will be converted to a Message payload that is a MultiValueMap containing values that may be byte arrays, Strings, or instances of Spring's MultipartFile depending on the content type of the individual parts.

In sending a response to the client there are a number of ways to customize the behavior of the gateway. By default the gateway will simply acknowledge that the request was received by sending a 200 status code back. It is possible to customize this response by providing a 'viewName' to be resolved by the Spring MVC ViewResolver. In the case that the gateway should expect a reply to the Message then setting the expectReply flag (constructor argument) will cause the gateway to wait for a reply Message before creating an HTTP response. Below is an example of a gateway configured to serve as a Spring MVC Controller with a view name. Because of the constructor arg value of TRUE, it wait for a reply. This also shows how to customize the HTTP methods accepted by the gateway, which are POST and GET by default.

<bean id="httpInbound"
  class="org.springframework.integration.http.inbound.HttpRequestHandlingController">
  <constructor-arg value="true" /> <!-- indicates that a reply is expected -->
  <property name="requestChannel" ref="httpRequestChannel" />
  <property name="replyChannel" ref="httpReplyChannel" />
  <property name="viewName" value="jsonView" />
  <property name="supportedMethodNames" >
    <list>
      <value>GET</value>
      <value>DELETE</value>
    </list>
  </property>
</bean>

The reply message will be available in the Model map. The key that is used for that map entry by default is 'reply', but this can be overridden by setting the 'replyKey' property on the endpoint's configuration.

To configure the HttpRequestExecutingMessageHandler write a bean definition like this:

<bean id="httpOutbound"
  class="org.springframework.integration.http.outbound.HttpRequestExecutingMessageHandler">
  <constructor-arg value="http://localhost:8080/example" />
  <property name="outputChannel" ref="responseChannel" />
</bean>

This bean definition will execute HTTP requests by delegating to a RestTemplate. That template in turn delegates to a list of HttpMessageConverters to generate the HTTP request body from the Message payload. You can configure those converters as well as the ClientHttpRequestFactory instance to use:

<bean id="httpOutbound"
  class="org.springframework.integration.http.outbound.HttpRequestExecutingMessageHandler">
  <constructor-arg value="http://localhost:8080/example" />
  <property name="outputChannel" ref="responseChannel" />
  <property name="messageConverters" ref="messageConverterList" />
  <property name="requestFactory" ref="customRequestFactory" />
</bean>

By default the HTTP request will be generated using an instance of SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory which uses the JDK HttpURLConnection. Use of the Apache Commons HTTP Client is also supported through the provided CommonsClientHttpRequestFactory which can be injected as shown above.

Cookies

Basic cookie support is provided by the transfer-cookies attribute on the outbound gateway. When set to true (default is false), a Set-Cookie header received from the server in a response will be converted to Cookie in the reply message. This header will then be used on subsequent sends. This enables simple stateful interactions, such as...

...->logonGateway->...->doWorkGateway->...->logoffGateway->...

If transfer-cookies is false, any Set-Cookie header received will remain as Set-Cookie in the reply message, and will be dropped on subsequent sends.

Spring Integration provides an http namespace and the corresponding schema definition. To include it in your configuration, simply provide the following namespace declaration in your application context configuration file:

<?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:int="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration"
  xmlns:int-http="http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/http"
  xsi:schemaLocation="
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/spring-integration.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/http
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/integration/http/spring-integration-http.xsd">
    ...
</beans>

Inbound

The XML Namespace provides two components for handling HTTP Inbound requests. In order to process requests without returning a dedicated response, use the inbound-channel-adapter:

<int-http:inbound-channel-adapter id="httpChannelAdapter" channel="requests"
    supported-methods="PUT, DELETE"/>

To process requests that do expect a response, use an inbound-gateway:

<int-http:inbound-gateway id="inboundGateway"
    request-channel="requests"
    reply-channel="responses"/>

Request Mapping support

The parsing of the HTTP Inbound Gateway or the HTTP Inbound Channel Adapter registers an integrationRequestMappingHandlerMapping bean of type IntegrationRequestMappingHandlerMapping, in case there is none registered, yet. This particular implementation of the HandlerMapping delegates its logic to the RequestMappingInfoHandlerMapping. The implementation provides similar functionality as the one provided by the org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping annotation in Spring MVC.

For this purpose, Spring Integration 3.0 introduces the <request-mapping> sub-element. This optional sub-element can be added to the <http:inbound-channel-adapter> and the <http:inbound-gateway>. It works in conjunction with the path and supported-methods attributes:

<inbound-gateway id="inboundController"
    request-channel="requests"
    reply-channel="responses"
    path="/foo/{fooId}"
    supported-methods="GET"
    view-name="foo"
    error-code="oops">
   <request-mapping headers="User-Agent"
     params="myParam=myValue"
     consumes="application/json"
     produces="!text/plain"/>
</inbound-gateway>

Based on this configuration, the namespace parser creates an instance of the IntegrationRequestMappingHandlerMapping (if none exists, yet), a HttpRequestHandlingController bean and associated with it an instance of RequestMapping, which in turn, is converted to the Spring MVC RequestMappingInfo.

The <request-mapping> sub-element provides the following attributes:

With the path and supported-methods attributes of the <http:inbound-channel-adapter> or the <http:inbound-gateway>, <request-mapping> attributes translate directly into the respective options provided by the org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping annotation in Spring MVC.

The <request-mapping> sub-element allows you to configure several Spring Integration HTTP Inbound Endpoints to the same path (or even the same supported-methods) and to provide different downstream message flows based on incoming HTTP requests.

Alternatively, you can also declare just one HTTP Inbound Endpoint and apply routing and filtering logic within the Spring Integration flow to achieve the same result. This allows you to get the Message into the flow as early as possibly, e.g.:

<int-http:inbound-gateway request-channel="httpMethodRouter"
    supported-methods="GET,DELETE"
    path="/process/{entId}"
    payload-expression="#pathVariables.entId"/>

<int:router input-channel="httpMethodRouter" expression="headers.http_requestMethod">
    <int:mapping value="GET" channel="in1"/>
    <int:mapping value="DELETE" channel="in2"/>
</int:router>

<int:service-activator input-channel="in1" ref="service" method="getEntity"/>

<int:service-activator input-channel="in2" ref="service" method="delete"/>

For more information regarding Handler Mappings, please see:

URI Template Variables and Expressions

By Using the path attribute in conjunction with the payload-expression attribute as well as the header sub-element, you have a high degree of flexibility for mapping inbound request data.

In the following example configuration, an Inbound Channel Adapter is configured to accept requests using the following URI: /first-name/{firstName}/last-name/{lastName}

Using the payload-expression attribute, the URI template variable {firstName} is mapped to be the Message payload, while the {lastName} URI template variable will map to the lname Message header.

<int-http:inbound-channel-adapter id="inboundAdapterWithExpressions"
    path="/first-name/{firstName}/last-name/{lastName}"
    channel="requests"
    payload-expression="#pathVariables.firstName">
    <int-http:header name="lname" expression="#pathVariables.lastName"/>
</int-http:inbound-channel-adapter>

For more information about URI template variables, please see the Spring Reference Manual:

Since Spring Integration 3.0, in addition to the existing #pathVariables and #requestParams variables being available in payload and header expressions, other useful variables have been added.

The entire list of available expression variables:

Note, all these values (and others) can be accessed within expressions in the downstream message flow via the ThreadLocal org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestAttributes variable, if that message flow is single-threaded and lives within the request thread:

<int-:transformer
	expression="T(org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextHolder).
	              requestAttributes.request.queryString"/>
    

Outbound

To configure the outbound gateway you can use the namespace support as well. The following code snippet shows the different configuration options for an outbound Http gateway. Most importantly, notice that the 'http-method' and 'expected-response-type' are provided. Those are two of the most commonly configured values. The default http-method is POST, and the default response type is null. With a null response type, the payload of the reply Message would contain the ResponseEntity as long as it's http status is a success (non-successful status codes will throw Exceptions). If you are expecting a different type, such as a String, then provide that fully-qualified class name as shown below. See also the note about empty response bodies in Section 16.3, “Http Outbound Gateway”.

<int-http:outbound-gateway id="example"
    request-channel="requests"
    url="http://localhost/test"
    http-method="POST"
    extract-request-payload="false"
    expected-response-type="java.lang.String"
    charset="UTF-8"
    request-factory="requestFactory"
    reply-timeout="1234"
    reply-channel="replies"/>

Beginning with Spring Integration 2.2 you can also determine the HTTP Method dynamically using SpEL and the http-method-expression attribute. Note that this attribute is obviously murually exclusive with http-method You can also use expected-response-type-expression attribute instead of expected-response-type and provide any valid SpEL expression that determines the type of the response.

<int-http:outbound-gateway id="example"
    request-channel="requests"
    url="http://localhost/test"
    http-method-expression="headers.httpMethod"
    extract-request-payload="false"
    expected-response-type-expression="payload"
    charset="UTF-8"
    request-factory="requestFactory"
    reply-timeout="1234"
    reply-channel="replies"/>

If your outbound adapter is to be used in a unidirectional way, then you can use an outbound-channel-adapter instead. This means that a successful response will simply execute without sending any Messages to a reply channel. In the case of any non-successful response status code, it will throw an exception. The configuration looks very similar to the gateway:

<int-http:outbound-channel-adapter id="example"
    url="http://localhost/example"
    http-method="GET"
    channel="requests"
    charset="UTF-8"
    extract-payload="false"
    expected-response-type="java.lang.String"
    request-factory="someRequestFactory"
    order="3"
    auto-startup="false"/>

Mapping URI Variables

If your URL contains URI variables, you can map them using the uri-variable sub-element. This sub-element is available for the Http Outbound Gateway and the Http Outbound Channel Adapter.

<int-http:outbound-gateway id="trafficGateway"
    url="http://local.yahooapis.com/trafficData?appid=YdnDemo&amp;zip={zipCode}"
    request-channel="trafficChannel"
    http-method="GET"
    expected-response-type="java.lang.String">
    <int-http:uri-variable name="zipCode" expression="payload.getZip()"/>
</int-http:outbound-gateway>

The uri-variable sub-element defines two attributes: name and expression. The name attribute identifies the name of the URI variable, while the expression attribute is used to set the actual value. Using the expression attribute, you can leverage the full power of the Spring Expression Language (SpEL) which gives you full dynamic access to the message payload and the message headers. For example, in the above configuration the getZip() method will be invoked on the payload object of the Message and the result of that method will be used as the value for the URI variable named 'zipCode'.

Since Spring Integration 3.0, HTTP Outbound Endpoints support the uri-variables-expression attribute to specify an Expression which should be evaluated, resulting in a Map for all URI variable placeholders within the URL template. It provides a mechanism whereby different variable expressions can be used, based on the outbound message. This attribute is mutually exclusive with the <uri-variable/> sub-element:

<int-http:outbound-gateway
     url="http://foo.host/{foo}/bars/{bar}"
     request-channel="trafficChannel"
     http-method="GET"
     uri-variables-expression="@uriVariablesBean.populate(payload)"
     expected-response-type="java.lang.String"/>

where uriVariablesBean might be:

public class UriVariablesBean {
	private static final ExpressionParser EXPRESSION_PARSER = new SpelExpressionParser();

	public Map<String, ?> populate(Object payload) {
		Map<String, Object> variables = new HashMap<String, Object>();
		if (payload instanceOf String.class)) {
			variables.put("foo", "foo"));
		}
		else {
			variables.put("foo", EXPRESSION_PARSER.parseExpression("headers.bar"));
		}
		return variables;
	}

}

Controlling URI Encoding

By default, the URL string is encoded (see UriComponentsBuilder) to the URI object before sending the request. In some scenarios with a non-standard URI (e.g. the RabbitMQ Rest API) it is undesirable to perform the encoding. The <http:outbound-gateway/> and <http:outbound-channel-adapter/> provide an encode-uri attribute. To disable encoding the URL, this attribute should be set to false (by default it is true). If you wish to partially encode some of the URL, this can be achieved using an expression within a <uri-variable/>:

<http:outbound-gateway url="http://somehost/%2f/fooApps?bar={param}" encode-uri="false">
          <http:uri-variable name="param"
            expression="T(org.apache.commons.httpclient.util.URIUtil)
                                             .encodeWithinQuery('Hellow World!')"/>
</http:outbound-gateway>

In the context of HTTP components, there are two timing areas that have to be considered.

First, the components interact with Message Channels, for which timeouts can be specified. For example, an HTTP Inbound Gateway will forward messages received from connected HTTP Clients to a Message Channel (Request Timeout) and consequently the HTTP Inbound Gateway will receive a reply Message from the Reply Channel (Reply Timeout) that will be used to generate the HTTP Response. Please see the figure below for an illustration.

For outbound endpoints, the second thing to consider is timing while interacting with the remote server.

You may want to configure the HTTP related timeout behavior, when making active HTTP requests using the HTTP Oubound Gateway or the HTTP Outbound Channel Adapter. In those instances, these two components use Spring's RestTemplate support to execute HTTP requests.

In order to configure timeouts for the HTTP Oubound Gateway and the HTTP Outbound Channel Adapter, you can either reference a RestTemplate bean directly, using the rest-template attribute, or you can provide a reference to a ClientHttpRequestFactory bean using the request-factory attribute. Spring provides the following implementations of the ClientHttpRequestFactory interface:

SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory - Uses standard J2SE facilities for making HTTP Requests

HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory - Uses Apache HttpComponents HttpClient (Since Spring 3.1)

ClientHttpRequestFactory - Uses Jakarta Commons HttpClient (Deprecated as of Spring 3.1)

If you don't explicitly configure the request-factory or rest-template attribute respectively, then a default RestTemplate which uses a SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory will be instantiated.

Here is an example of how to configure an HTTP Outbound Gateway using a SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory, configured with connect and read timeouts of 5 seconds respectively:

<int-http:outbound-gateway url="http://www.google.com/ig/api?weather={city}"
                           http-method="GET"
                           expected-response-type="java.lang.String"
                           request-factory="requestFactory"
                           request-channel="requestChannel"
                           reply-channel="replyChannel">
    <int-http:uri-variable name="city" expression="payload"/>
</int-http:outbound-gateway>

<bean id="requestFactory"
      class="org.springframework.http.client.SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory">
    <property name="connectTimeout" value="5000"/>
    <property name="readTimeout"    value="5000"/>
</bean>

HTTP Outbound Gateway

For the HTTP Outbound Gateway, the XML Schema defines only the reply-timeout. The reply-timeout maps to the sendTimeout property of the org.springframework.integration.http.outbound.HttpRequestExecutingMessageHandler class. More precisely, the property is set on the extended AbstractReplyProducingMessageHandler class, which ultimatelly sets the property on the MessagingTemplate.

The value of the sendTimeout property defaults to "-1" and will be applied to the connected MessageChannel. This means, that depending on the implementation, the Message Channel's send method may block indefinitely. Furthermore, the sendTimeout property is only used, when the actual MessageChannel implementation has a blocking send (such as 'full' bounded QueueChannel).

HTTP Inbound Gateway

For the HTTP Inbound Gateway, the XML Schema defines the request-timeout attribute, which will be used to set the requestTimeout property on the HttpRequestHandlingMessagingGateway class (on the extended MessagingGatewaySupport class). Secondly, the reply-timeout attribute exists and it maps to the replyTimeout property on the same class.

The default for both timeout properties is "1000ms". Ultimately, the request-timeout property will be used to set the sendTimeout on the used MessagingTemplate instance. The replyTimeout property on the other hand, will be used to set the receiveTimeout property on the used MessagingTemplate instance.

If you are behind a proxy and need to configure proxy settings for HTTP outbound adapters and/or gateways, you can apply one of two approaches. In most cases, you can rely on the standard Java System Properties that control the proxy settings. Otherwise, you can explicitly configure a Spring bean for the HTTP client request factory instance.

Standard Java Proxy configuration

There are 3 System Properties you can set to configure the proxy settings that will be used by the HTTP protocol handler:

And for HTTPS:

For more information please refer to this document: http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/net/proxies.html

Spring's SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory

If for any reason, you need more explicit control over the proxy configuration, you can use Spring's SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory and configure its 'proxy' property as such:

<bean id="requestFactory"
    class="org.springframework.http.client.SimpleClientHttpRequestFactory">
    <property name="proxy">
        <bean id="proxy" class="java.net.Proxy">
            <constructor-arg>
                <util:constant static-field="java.net.Proxy.Type.HTTP"/>
            </constructor-arg>
            <constructor-arg>
                <bean class="java.net.InetSocketAddress">
                    <constructor-arg value="123.0.0.1"/>
                    <constructor-arg value="8080"/>
                </bean>
            </constructor-arg>
        </bean>
    </property>
</bean>

Spring Integration provides support for Http Header mapping for both HTTP Request and HTTP Responses.

By default all standard Http Headers as defined here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields will be mapped from the message to HTTP request/response headers without further configuration. However if you do need further customization you may provide additional configuration via convenient namespace support. You can provide a comma-separated list of header names, and you can also include simple patterns with the '*' character acting as a wildcard. If you do provide such values, it will override the default behavior. Basically, it assumes you are in complete control at that point. However, if you do want to include all of the standard HTTP headers, you can use the shortcut patterns: HTTP_REQUEST_HEADERS and HTTP_RESPONSE_HEADERS. Here are some examples:

<int-http:outbound-gateway id="httpGateway"
    url="http://localhost/test2"
    mapped-request-headers="foo, bar"
    mapped-response-headers="X-*, HTTP_RESPONSE_HEADERS"
    channel="someChannel"/>

<int-http:outbound-channel-adapter id="httpAdapter"
    url="http://localhost/test2"
    mapped-request-headers="foo, bar, HTTP_REQUEST_HEADERS"
    channel="someChannel"/>

The adapters and gateways will use the DefaultHttpHeaderMapper which now provides two static factory methods for "inbound" and "outbound" adapters so that the proper direction can be applied (mapping HTTP requests/responses IN/OUT as appropriate).

If further customization is required you can also configure a DefaultHttpHeaderMapper independently and inject it into the adapter via the header-mapper attribute.

<int-http:outbound-gateway id="httpGateway"
    url="http://localhost/test2"
    header-mapper="headerMapper"
    channel="someChannel"/>

<bean id="headerMapper" class="o.s.i.http.support.DefaultHttpHeaderMapper">
    <property name="inboundHeaderNames" value="foo*, *bar, baz"/>
    <property name="outboundHeaderNames" value="a*b, d"/>
</bean>

Of course, you can even implement the HeaderMapper strategy interface directly and provide a reference to that if you need to do something other than what the DefaultHttpHeaderMapper supports.