To receive events and send them to a channel, simply define an instance of Spring Integration’s ApplicationEventListeningMessageProducer. This class is an implementation of Spring’s ApplicationListener interface. By default it will pass all received events as Spring Integration Messages. To limit based on the type of event, configure the list of event types that you want to receive with the eventTypes property. If a received event has a Message instance as its source, then that will be passed as-is. Otherwise, if a SpEL-based "payloadExpression" has been provided, that will be evaluated against the ApplicationEvent instance. If the event’s source is not a Message instance and no "payloadExpression" has been provided, then the ApplicationEvent itself will be passed as the payload.

Starting with version 4.2 the ApplicationEventListeningMessageProducer implements GenericApplicationListener and can be configured to accept not only ApplicationEvent types, but any type for treating payload events which are supported since Spring Framework 4.2, too. When the accepted event is an instance of PayloadApplicationEvent, its payload is used for the message to send.

For convenience namespace support is provided to configure an ApplicationEventListeningMessageProducer via the inbound-channel-adapter element.

<int-event:inbound-channel-adapter channel="eventChannel"
                                   error-channel="eventErrorChannel"
                                   event-types="example.FooEvent, example.BarEvent, java.util.Date"/>

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

In the above example, all Application Context events that match one of the types specified by the event-types (optional) attribute will be delivered as Spring Integration Messages to the Message Channel named eventChannel. If a downstream component throws an exception, a MessagingException containing the failed message and exception will be sent to the channel named eventErrorChannel. If no "error-channel" is specified and the downstream channels are synchronous, the Exception will be propagated to the caller.

To send Spring ApplicationEvents, create an instance of the ApplicationEventPublishingMessageHandler and register it within an endpoint. This implementation of the MessageHandler interface also implements Spring’s ApplicationEventPublisherAware interface and thus acts as a bridge between Spring Integration Messages and ApplicationEvents.

For convenience namespace support is provided to configure an ApplicationEventPublishingMessageHandler via the outbound-channel-adapter element.

<int:channel id="eventChannel"/>

<int-event:outbound-channel-adapter channel="eventChannel"/>

If you are using a PollableChannel (e.g., Queue), you can also provide poller as a sub-element of the outbound-channel-adapter element. You can also optionally provide a task-executor reference for that poller. The following example demonstrates both.

<int:channel id="eventChannel">
  <int:queue/>
</int:channel>

<int-event:outbound-channel-adapter channel="eventChannel">
  <int:poller max-messages-per-poll="1" task-executor="executor" fixed-rate="100"/>
</int-event:outbound-channel-adapter>

<task:executor id="executor" pool-size="5"/>

In the above example, all messages sent to the eventChannel channel will be published as ApplicationEvents to any relevant ApplicationListener instances that are registered within the same Spring ApplicationContext. If the payload of the Message is an ApplicationEvent, it will be passed as-is. Otherwise the Message itself will be wrapped in a MessagingEvent instance.

Starting with version 4.2 the ApplicationEventPublishingMessageHandler (<int-event:outbound-channel-adapter>) can be configured with the publish-payload boolean attribute to publish to the application context payload as is, instead of wrapping it to a MessagingEvent instance.