This version is still in development and is not considered stable yet. For the latest stable version, please use Spring Integration 6.4.1!

Outbound Message Conversion

Spring AMQP 1.4 introduced the ContentTypeDelegatingMessageConverter, where the actual converter is selected based on the incoming content type message property. This can be used by inbound endpoints.

As of Spring Integration version 4.3, you can use the ContentTypeDelegatingMessageConverter on outbound endpoints as well, with the contentType header specifying which converter is used.

The following example configures a ContentTypeDelegatingMessageConverter, with the default converter being the SimpleMessageConverter (which handles Java serialization and plain text), together with a JSON converter:

<amqp:outbound-channel-adapter id="withContentTypeConverter" channel="ctRequestChannel"
                               exchange-name="someExchange"
                               routing-key="someKey"
                               amqp-template="amqpTemplateContentTypeConverter" />

<int:channel id="ctRequestChannel"/>

<rabbit:template id="amqpTemplateContentTypeConverter"
        connection-factory="connectionFactory" message-converter="ctConverter" />

<bean id="ctConverter"
        class="o.s.amqp.support.converter.ContentTypeDelegatingMessageConverter">
    <property name="delegates">
        <map>
            <entry key="application/json">
                <bean class="o.s.amqp.support.converter.Jackson2JsonMessageConverter" />
            </entry>
        </map>
    </property>
</bean>

Sending a message to ctRequestChannel with the contentType header set to application/json causes the JSON converter to be selected.

This applies to both the outbound channel adapter and gateway.

Starting with version 5.0, headers that are added to the MessageProperties of the outbound message are never overwritten by mapped headers (by default). Previously, this was only the case if the message converter was a ContentTypeDelegatingMessageConverter (in that case, the header was mapped first so that the proper converter could be selected). For other converters, such as the SimpleMessageConverter, mapped headers overwrote any headers added by the converter. This caused problems when an outbound message had some leftover contentType headers (perhaps from an inbound channel adapter) and the correct outbound contentType was incorrectly overwritten. The work-around was to use a header filter to remove the header before sending the message to the outbound endpoint.

There are, however, cases where the previous behavior is desired — for example, when a String payload that contains JSON, the SimpleMessageConverter is not aware of the content and sets the contentType message property to text/plain but your application would like to override that to application/json by setting the contentType header of the message sent to the outbound endpoint. The ObjectToJsonTransformer does exactly that (by default).

There is now a property called headersMappedLast on the outbound channel adapter and gateway (as well as on AMQP-backed channels). Setting this to true restores the behavior of overwriting the property added by the converter.

Starting with version 5.1.9, a similar replyHeadersMappedLast is provided for the AmqpInboundGateway when we produce a reply and would like to override headers populated by the converter. See its JavaDocs for more information.