public interface MessageChannel {

    boolean send(Message message);

    boolean send(Message message, long timeout);
}

Since Message Channels may or may not buffer Messages (as discussed in the overview), there are two sub-interfaces defining the buffering (pollable) and non-buffering (subscribable) channel behavior. Here is the definition of PollableChannel.

public interface PollableChannel extends MessageChannel {

    Message<?> receive();

    Message<?> receive(long timeout);

}

Similar to the send methods, when receiving a message, the return value will be null in the case of a timeout or interrupt.

The SubscribableChannel base interface is implemented by channels that send Messages directly to their subscribed MessageHandlers. Therefore, they do not provide receive methods for polling, but instead define methods for managing those subscribers:

public interface SubscribableChannel extends MessageChannel {

    boolean subscribe(MessageHandler handler);

    boolean unsubscribe(MessageHandler handler);

}

The PublishSubscribeChannel implementation broadcasts any Message sent to it to all of its subscribed handlers. This is most often used for sending Event Messages whose primary role is notification as opposed to Document Messages which are generally intended to be processed by a single handler. Note that the PublishSubscribeChannel is intended for sending only. Since it broadcasts to its subscribers directly when its send(Message) method is invoked, consumers cannot poll for Messages (it does not implement PollableChannel and therefore has no receive() method). Instead, any subscriber must be a MessageHandler itself, and the subscriber's handleMessage(Message) method will be invoked in turn.

Prior to version 3.0, invoking the send method on a PublishSubscribeChannel that had no subscribers returned false. When used in conjunction with a MessagingTemplate, a MessageDeliveryException was thrown. Starting with version 3.0, the behavior has changed such that a send is always considered successful if at least the minimum subscribers are present (and successfully handle the message). This behavior can be modified by setting the minSubscribers property, which defaults to 0.

The QueueChannel implementation wraps a queue. Unlike the PublishSubscribeChannel, the QueueChannel has point-to-point semantics. In other words, even if the channel has multiple consumers, only one of them should receive any Message sent to that channel. It provides a default no-argument constructor (providing an essentially unbounded capacity of Integer.MAX_VALUE) as well as a constructor that accepts the queue capacity:

public QueueChannel(int capacity)

A channel that has not reached its capacity limit will store messages in its internal queue, and the send() method will return immediately even if no receiver is ready to handle the message. If the queue has reached capacity, then the sender will block until room is available. Or, if using the send call that accepts a timeout, it will block until either room is available or the timeout period elapses, whichever occurs first. Likewise, a receive call will return immediately if a message is available on the queue, but if the queue is empty, then a receive call may block until either a message is available or the timeout elapses. In either case, it is possible to force an immediate return regardless of the queue's state by passing a timeout value of 0. Note however, that calls to the no-arg versions of send() and receive() will block indefinitely.

Whereas the QueueChannel enforces first-in/first-out (FIFO) ordering, the PriorityChannel is an alternative implementation that allows for messages to be ordered within the channel based upon a priority. By default the priority is determined by the 'priority' header within each message. However, for custom priority determination logic, a comparator of type Comparator<Message<?>> can be provided to the PriorityChannel's constructor.

The RendezvousChannel enables a "direct-handoff" scenario where a sender will block until another party invokes the channel's receive() method or vice-versa. Internally, this implementation is quite similar to the QueueChannel except that it uses a SynchronousQueue (a zero-capacity implementation of BlockingQueue). This works well in situations where the sender and receiver are operating in different threads but simply dropping the message in a queue asynchronously is not appropriate. In other words, with a RendezvousChannel at least the sender knows that some receiver has accepted the message, whereas with a QueueChannel, the message would have been stored to the internal queue and potentially never received.

The RendezvousChannel is also useful for implementing request-reply operations. The sender can create a temporary, anonymous instance of RendezvousChannel which it then sets as the 'replyChannel' header when building a Message. After sending that Message, the sender can immediately call receive (optionally providing a timeout value) in order to block while waiting for a reply Message. This is very similar to the implementation used internally by many of Spring Integration's request-reply components.

The DirectChannel has point-to-point semantics but otherwise is more similar to the PublishSubscribeChannel than any of the queue-based channel implementations described above. It implements the SubscribableChannel interface instead of the PollableChannel interface, so it dispatches Messages directly to a subscriber. As a point-to-point channel, however, it differs from the PublishSubscribeChannel in that it will only send each Message to a single subscribed MessageHandler.

In addition to being the simplest point-to-point channel option, one of its most important features is that it enables a single thread to perform the operations on "both sides" of the channel. For example, if a handler is subscribed to a DirectChannel, then sending a Message to that channel will trigger invocation of that handler's handleMessage(Message) method directly in the sender's thread, before the send() method invocation can return.

The key motivation for providing a channel implementation with this behavior is to support transactions that must span across the channel while still benefiting from the abstraction and loose coupling that the channel provides. If the send call is invoked within the scope of a transaction, then the outcome of the handler's invocation (e.g. updating a database record) will play a role in determining the ultimate result of that transaction (commit or rollback).

The DirectChannel internally delegates to a Message Dispatcher to invoke its subscribed Message Handlers, and that dispatcher can have a load-balancing strategy exposed via load-balancer or load-balancer-ref attributes (mutually exclusive). The load balancing strategy is used by the Message Dispatcher to help determine how Messages are distributed amongst Message Handlers in the case that there are multiple Message Handlers subscribed to the same channel. As a convinience the load-balancer attribute exposes enumeration of values pointing to pre-existing implementations of LoadBalancingStrategy. The "round-robin" (load-balances across the handlers in rotation) and "none" (for the cases where one wants to explicitely disable load balancing) are the only available values. Other strategy implementations may be added in future versions. However, since version 3.0 you can provide your own implementation of the LoadBalancingStrategy and inject it using load-balancer-ref attribute which should point to a bean that implements LoadBalancingStrategy.

<int:channel id="lbRefChannel">
  <int:dispatcher load-balancer-ref="lb"/>
</int:channel>
  
<bean id="lb" class="foo.bar.SampleLoadBalancingStrategy"/>

Note that load-balancer or load-balancer-ref attributes are mutually exclusive.

The load-balancing also works in combination with a boolean failover property. If the "failover" value is true (the default), then the dispatcher will fall back to any subsequent handlers as necessary when preceding handlers throw Exceptions. The order is determined by an optional order value defined on the handlers themselves or, if no such value exists, the order in which the handlers are subscribed.

If a certain situation requires that the dispatcher always try to invoke the first handler, then fallback in the same fixed order sequence every time an error occurs, no load-balancing strategy should be provided. In other words, the dispatcher still supports the failover boolean property even when no load-balancing is enabled. Without load-balancing, however, the invocation of handlers will always begin with the first according to their order. For example, this approach works well when there is a clear definition of primary, secondary, tertiary, and so on. When using the namespace support, the "order" attribute on any endpoint will determine that order.

The ExecutorChannel is a point-to-point channel that supports the same dispatcher configuration as DirectChannel (load-balancing strategy and the failover boolean property). The key difference between these two dispatching channel types is that the ExecutorChannel delegates to an instance of TaskExecutor to perform the dispatch. This means that the send method typically will not block, but it also means that the handler invocation may not occur in the sender's thread. It therefore does not support transactions spanning the sender and receiving handler.

Spring Integration 1.0 provided a ThreadLocalChannel implementation, but that has been removed as of 2.0. Now, there is a more general way for handling the same requirement by simply adding a "scope" attribute to a channel. The value of the attribute can be any name of a Scope that is available within the context. For example, in a web environment, certain Scopes are available, and any custom Scope implementations can be registered with the context. Here's an example of a ThreadLocal-based scope being applied to a channel, including the registration of the Scope itself.

<int:channel id="threadScopedChannel" scope="thread">
     <int:queue />
</int:channel>

<bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.CustomScopeConfigurer">
    <property name="scopes">
        <map>
            <entry key="thread" value="org.springframework.context.support.SimpleThreadScope" />
        </map>
    </property>
</bean>

The channel above also delegates to a queue internally, but the channel is bound to the current thread, so the contents of the queue are as well. That way the thread that sends to the channel will later be able to receive those same Messages, but no other thread would be able to access them. While thread-scoped channels are rarely needed, they can be useful in situations where DirectChannels are being used to enforce a single thread of operation but any reply Messages should be sent to a "terminal" channel. If that terminal channel is thread-scoped, the original sending thread can collect its replies from it.

Now, since any channel can be scoped, you can define your own scopes in addition to Thread Local.

<int:channel id="exampleChannel"/>

<int:publish-subscribe-channel id="exampleChannel"/>

As mentioned above, DirectChannel is the default type.

<int:channel id="directChannel"/>

A default channel will have a round-robin load-balancer and will also have failover enabled (See the discussion in the section called “DirectChannel” for more detail). To disable one or both of these, add a <dispatcher/> sub-element and configure the attributes:

<int:channel id="failFastChannel">
    <int:dispatcher failover="false"/>
</channel>

<int:channel id="channelWithFixedOrderSequenceFailover">
    <int:dispatcher load-balancer="none"/>
</int:channel>

There are times when a consumer can only process a particular type of payload and you need to therefore ensure the payload type of input Messages. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is Message Filter. However all that Message Filter will do is filter out Messages that are not compliant with the requirements of the consumer. Another way would be to use a Content Based Router and route Messages with non-compliant data-types to specific Transformers to enforce transformation/conversion to the required data-type. This of course would work, but a simpler way of accomplishing the same thing is to apply the Datatype Channel pattern. You can use separate Datatype Channels for each specific payload data-type.

To create a Datatype Channel that only accepts messages containing a certain payload type, provide the fully-qualified class name in the channel element's datatype attribute:

<int:channel id="numberChannel" datatype="java.lang.Number"/>

Note that the type check passes for any type that is assignable to the channel's datatype. In other words, the "numberChannel" above would accept messages whose payload is java.lang.Integer or java.lang.Double. Multiple types can be provided as a comma-delimited list:

<int:channel id="stringOrNumberChannel" datatype="java.lang.String,java.lang.Number"/>

So the 'numberChannel' above will only accept Messages with a data-type of java.lang.Number. But what happens if the payload of the Message is not of the required type? It depends on whether you have defined a bean named "integrationConversionService" that is an instance of Spring's Conversion Service. If not, then an Exception would be thrown immediately, but if you do have an "integrationConversionService" bean defined, it will be used in an attempt to convert the Message's payload to the acceptable type.

You can even register custom converters. For example, let's say you are sending a Message with a String payload to the 'numberChannel' we configured above.

MessageChannel inChannel = context.getBean("numberChannel", MessageChannel.class);
inChannel.send(new GenericMessage<String>("5"));

Typically this would be a perfectly legal operation, however since we are using Datatype Channel the result of such operation would generate an exception:

Exception in thread "main" org.springframework.integration.MessageDeliveryException:
Channel 'numberChannel'
expected one of the following datataypes [class java.lang.Number],
but received [class java.lang.String]
…

And rightfully so since we are requiring the payload type to be a Number while sending a String. So we need something to convert String to a Number. All we need to do is implement a Converter.

public static class StringToIntegerConverter implements Converter<String, Integer> {
	public Integer convert(String source) {
		return Integer.parseInt(source);
	}
}

Then, register it as a Converter with the Integration Conversion Service:

<int:converter ref="strToInt"/>

<bean id="strToInt" class="org.springframework.integration.util.Demo.StringToIntegerConverter"/>

When the 'converter' element is parsed, it will create the "integrationConversionService" bean on-demand if one is not already defined. With that Converter in place, the send operation would now be successful since the Datatype Channel will use that Converter to convert the String payload to an Integer.

Beginning with version 4.0, the integrationConversionService is invoked by the DefaultDatatypeChannelMessageConverter, which looks up the conversion service in the application context. To use a different conversion technique, you can specify the message-converter attribute on the channel. This must be a reference to a MessageConverter implementation. Only the fromMessage method is used, which provides the converter with access to the message headers (for example if the conversion might need information from the headers, such as content-type). The method can return just the converted payload, or a full Message object. If the latter, the converter must be careful to copy all the headers from the inbound message.

Alternatively, declare a <bean/> of type MessageConverter with an id "datatypeChannelMessageConverter" and that converter will be used by all channels with a datatype.

To create a QueueChannel, use the <queue/> sub-element. You may specify the channel's capacity:

<int:channel id="queueChannel">
    <queue capacity="25"/>
</int:channel>

Persistent QueueChannel Configuration

Since a QueueChannel provides the capability to buffer Messages, but does so in-memory only by default, it also introduces a possibility that Messages could be lost in the event of a system failure. To mitigate this risk, a QueueChannel may be backed by a persistent implementation of the MessageGroupStore strategy interface. For more details on MessageGroupStore and MessageStore see Section 8.3, “Message Store”.

When a QueueChannel receives a Message, it will add it to the Message Store, and when a Message is polled from a QueueChannel, it is removed from the Message Store.

By default any QueueChannel only stores its Messages in an in-memory Queue and can therefore lead to the lost message scenario mentioned above. However Spring Integration provides a JdbcMessageStore to allow a QueueChannel to be backed by an RDBMS.

You can configure a Message Store for any QueueChannel by adding the message-store attribute as shown in the next example.

<int:channel id="dbBackedChannel">
    <int:queue message-store="messageStore"/>
</int:channel>

<int-jdbc:message-store id="messageStore" data-source="someDataSource"/>

The above example also shows that JdbcMessageStore can be configured with the namespace support provided by the Spring Integration JDBC module. All you need to do is inject any javax.sql.DataSource instance. The Spring Integration JDBC module also provides schema DDL for most popular databases. These schemas are located in the org.springframework.integration.jdbc package of that module (spring-integration-jdbc).

Many other implementations of the Message Store will be available as the growing number of Spring projects related to "NoSQL" data stores provide the underlying support. Of course, you can always provide your own implementation of the MessageGroupStore interface if you cannot find one that meets your particular needs.

Since version 4.0, it is recommended that QueueChannels are configured to use a ChannelMessageStore if possible. These are generally optimized for this use, when compared with a general message store. If the ChannelMessageStore is a ChannelPriorityMessageStore the messages will be received in FIFO within priority order. The notion of priority is determined by the message store implementation.

To create a PublishSubscribeChannel, use the <publish-subscribe-channel/> element. When using this element, you can also specify the task-executor used for publishing Messages (if none is specified it simply publishes in the sender's thread):

<int:publish-subscribe-channel id="pubsubChannel" task-executor="someExecutor"/>

If you are providing a Resequencer or Aggregator downstream from a PublishSubscribeChannel, then you can set the 'apply-sequence' property on the channel to true. That will indicate that the channel should set the sequence-size and sequence-number Message headers as well as the correlation id prior to passing the Messages along. For example, if there are 5 subscribers, the sequence-size would be set to 5, and the Messages would have sequence-number header values ranging from 1 to 5.

<int:publish-subscribe-channel id="pubsubChannel" apply-sequence="true"/>

To create an ExecutorChannel, add the <dispatcher> sub-element along with a task-executor attribute. Its value can reference any TaskExecutor within the context. For example, this enables configuration of a thread-pool for dispatching messages to subscribed handlers. As mentioned above, this does break the "single-threaded" execution context between sender and receiver so that any active transaction context will not be shared by the invocation of the handler (i.e. the handler may throw an Exception, but the send invocation has already returned successfully).

<int:channel id="executorChannel">
    <int:dispatcher task-executor="someExecutor"/>
</int:channel>

To create a PriorityChannel, use the <priority-queue/> sub-element:

<int:channel id="priorityChannel">
    <int:priority-queue capacity="20"/>
</int:channel>

By default, the channel will consult the priority header of the message. However, a custom Comparator reference may be provided instead. Also, note that the PriorityChannel (like the other types) does support the datatype attribute. As with the QueueChannel, it also supports a capacity attribute. The following example demonstrates all of these:

<int:channel id="priorityChannel" datatype="example.Widget">
    <int:priority-queue comparator="widgetComparator"
                    capacity="10"/>
</int:channel>

Since version 4.0, the priority-channel child element supports the message-store option (comparator is not allowed in that case). The message store must be a ChannelPriorityMessageStore and, in this case, the namespace parser will declare a QueueChannel instead of a PriorityChannel. See the section called “QueueChannel Configuration”.

A RendezvousChannel is created when the queue sub-element is a <rendezvous-queue>. It does not provide any additional configuration options to those described above, and its queue does not accept any capacity value since it is a 0-capacity direct handoff queue.

<int:channel id="rendezvousChannel"/>
    <int:rendezvous-queue/>
</int:channel>

Any channel can be configured with a "scope" attribute.

<int:channel id="threadLocalChannel" scope="thread"/>

Message channels may also have interceptors as described in Section 3.1.3, “Channel Interceptors”. The <interceptors/> sub-element can be added within <channel/> (or the more specific element types). Provide the ref attribute to reference any Spring-managed object that implements the ChannelInterceptor interface:

<int:channel id="exampleChannel">
    <int:interceptors>
        <ref bean="trafficMonitoringInterceptor"/>
    </int:interceptors>
</int:channel>

In general, it is a good idea to define the interceptor implementations in a separate location since they usually provide common behavior that can be reused across multiple channels.

Channel Interceptors provide a clean and concise way of applying cross-cutting behavior per individual channel. If the same behavior should be applied on multiple channels, configuring the same set of interceptors for each channel would not be the most efficient way. To avoid repeated configuration while also enabling interceptors to apply to multiple channels, Spring Integration provides Global Interceptors. Look at the example below:

<int:channel-interceptor pattern="input*, bar*, foo" order="3">
    <bean class="foo.barSampleInterceptor"/>
</int:channel-interceptor>

or

<int:channel-interceptor ref="myInterceptor" pattern="input*, bar*, foo" order="3"/>

<bean id="myInterceptor" class="foo.barSampleInterceptor"/>

Each <channel-interceptor/> element allows you to define a global interceptor which will be applied on all channels that match any patterns defined via the pattern attribute. In the above case the global interceptor will be applied on the 'foo' channel and all other channels that begin with 'bar' or 'input'. The order attribute allows you to manage where this interceptor will be injected if there are multiple interceptors on a given channel. For example, channel 'inputChannel' could have individual interceptors configured locally (see below):

<int:channel id="inputChannel"> 
  <int:interceptors>
    <int:wire-tap channel="logger"/> 
  </int:interceptors>
</int:channel>

A reasonable question is how will a global interceptor be injected in relation to other interceptors configured locally or through other global interceptor definitions? The current implementation provides a very simple mechanism for defining the order of interceptor execution. A positive number in the order attribute will ensure interceptor injection after any existing interceptors and a negative number will ensure that the interceptor is injected before existing interceptors. This means that in the above example, the global interceptor will be injected AFTER (since its order is greater than 0) the 'wire-tap' interceptor configured locally. If there were another global interceptor with a matching pattern, its order would be determined by comparing the values of the order attribute. To inject a global interceptor BEFORE the existing interceptors, use a negative value for the order attribute.

As mentioned above, Spring Integration provides a simple Wire Tap interceptor out of the box. You can configure a Wire Tap on any channel within an <interceptors/> element. This is especially useful for debugging, and can be used in conjunction with Spring Integration's logging Channel Adapter as follows:

<int:channel id="in">
    <int:interceptors>
        <int:wire-tap channel="logger"/>
    </int:interceptors>
</int:channel>

<int:logging-channel-adapter id="logger" level="DEBUG"/>

A little more on Wire Tap

One of the common misconceptions about the wire tap and other similar components (Section B.1, “Message Publishing Configuration”) is that they are automatically asynchronous in nature. Wire-tap as a component is not invoked asynchronously be default. Instead, Spring Integration focuses on a single unified approach to configuring asynchronous behavior: the Message Channel. What makes certain parts of the message flow sync or async is the type of Message Channel that has been configured within that flow. That is one of the primary benefits of the Message Channel abstraction. From the inception of the framework, we have always emphasized the need and the value of the Message Channel as a first-class citizen of the framework. It is not just an internal, implicit realization of the EIP pattern, it is fully exposed as a configurable component to the end user. So, the Wire-tap component is ONLY responsible for performing the following 3 tasks:

It is essentially a variation of the Bridge, but it is encapsulated within a channel definition (and hence easier to enable and disable without disrupting a flow). Also, unlike the bridge, it basically forks another message flow. Is that flow synchronous or asynchronous? The answer simply depends on the type of Message Channel that 'channelB' is. And, now you know that we have: Direct Channel, Pollable Channel, and Executor Channel as options. The last two do break the thread boundary making communication via such channels asynchronous simply because the dispatching of the message from that channel to its subscribed handlers happens on a different thread than the one used to send the message to that channel. That is what is going to make your wire-tap flow sync or async. It is consistent with other components within the framework (e.g., Message Publisher) and actually brings a level of consistency and simplicity by sparing you from worrying in advance (other than writing thread safe code) whether a particular piece of code should be implemented as sync or async. The actual wiring of two pieces of code (component A and component B) via Message Channel is what makes their collaboration sync or async. You may even want to change from sync to async in the future and Message Channel is what's going to allow you to do it swiftly without ever touching the code.

One final point regarding the Wire Tap is that, despite the rationale provided above for not being async be default, one should keep in mind it is usually desirable to hand off the Message as soon as possible. Therefore, it would be quite common to use an asynchronous channel option as the wire-tap's outbound channel. Nonetheless, another reason that we do not enforce asynchronous behavior by default is that you might not want to break a transactional boundary. Perhaps you are using the Wire Tap for auditing purposes, and you DO want the audit Messages to be sent within the original transaction. As an example, you might connect the wire-tap to a JMS outbound-channel-adapter. That way, you get the best of both worlds: 1) the sending of a JMS Message can occur within the transaction while 2) it is still a "fire-and-forget" action thereby preventing any noticeable delay in the main message flow.

It is possible to configure a global wire tap as a special case of the Global Channel Interceptor. Simply configure a top level wire-tap element. Now, in addition to the normal wire-tap namespace support, the pattern and order attributes are supported and work in exactly the same way as with the channel-interceptor

<int:wire-tap pattern="input*, bar*, foo" order="3" channel="wiretapChannel"/>