For the latest stable version, please use Spring Integration 6.4.0!

Remote Persistent File List Filters

Inbound and streaming inbound remote file channel adapters (FTP, SFTP, and other technologies) are configured with corresponding implementations of AbstractPersistentFileListFilter by default, configured with an in-memory MetadataStore. To run in a cluster, these can be replaced with filters using a shared MetadataStore (see Metadata Store for more information). These filters are used to prevent fetching the same file multiple times (unless it’s modified time changes). Starting with version 5.2, a file is added to the filter immediately before the file is fetched (and reversed if the fetch fails).

In the event of a catastrophic failure (such as power loss), it is possible that the file currently being fetched will remain in the filter and won’t be re-fetched when restarting the application. In this case you would need to manually remove this file from the MetadataStore.

In previous versions, the files were filtered before any were fetched, meaning that several files could be in this state after a catastrophic failure.

In order to facilitate this new behavior, two new methods have been added to FileListFilter.

boolean accept(F file);

boolean supportsSingleFileFiltering();

If a filter returns true in supportsSingleFileFiltering, it must implement accept().

If a remote filter does not support single file filtering (such as the AbstractMarkerFilePresentFileListFilter), the adapters revert to the previous behavior.

If multiple filters are in used (using a CompositeFileListFilter or ChainFileListFilter), then all of the delegate filters must support single file filtering in order for the composite filter to support it.

The persistent file list filters now have a boolean property forRecursion. Setting this property to true, also sets alwaysAcceptDirectories, which means that the recursive operation on the outbound gateways (ls and mget) will now always traverse the full directory tree each time. This is to solve a problem where changes deep in the directory tree were not detected. In addition, forRecursion=true causes the full path to files to be used as the metadata store keys; this solves a problem where the filter did not work properly if a file with the same name appears multiple times in different directories. IMPORTANT: This means that existing keys in a persistent metadata store will not be found for files beneath the top level directory. For this reason, the property is false by default; this may change in a future release.