Overview

Routers are a crucial element in many messaging architectures. They consume messages from a message channel and forward each consumed message to one or more different message channels depending on a set of conditions.

Spring Integration provides the following routers:

Router implementations share many configuration parameters. However, certain differences exist between routers. Furthermore, the availability of configuration parameters depends on whether routers are used inside or outside a chain. In order to provide a quick overview, all available attributes are listed in the two following tables .

The following table shows the configuration parameters available for a router outside a chain:

Table 1. Routers Outside a Chain
Attribute	router	header value router	xpath router	payload type router	recipient list route	exception type router
apply-sequence
default-output-channel
resolution-required
ignore-send-failures
timeout
id
auto-startup
input-channel
order
method
ref
expression
header-name
evaluate-as-string
xpath-expression-ref
converter

The following table shows the configuration parameters available for a router inside a chain:

Table 2. Routers Inside a Chain
Attribute	router	header value router	xpath router	payload type router	recipient list router	exception type router
apply-sequence
default-output-channel
resolution-required
ignore-send-failures
timeout
id
auto-startup
input-channel
order
method
ref
expression
header-name
evaluate-as-string
xpath-expression-ref
converter

As of Spring Integration 2.1, router parameters have been more standardized across all router implementations. Consequently, a few minor changes may break older Spring Integration based applications.

Since Spring Integration 2.1, the ignore-channel-name-resolution-failures attribute is removed in favor of consolidating its behavior with the resolution-required attribute. Also, the resolution-required attribute now defaults to true.

Prior to these changes, the resolution-required attribute defaulted to false, causing messages to be silently dropped when no channel was resolved and no default-output-channel was set. The new behavior requires at least one resolved channel and, by default, throws a MessageDeliveryException if no channel was determined (or an attempt to send was not successful).

If you do desire to drop messages silently, you can set default-output-channel="nullChannel".