The (supplied) TcpConnections now emit ApplicationEvents (specifically TcpConnectionEvents) when connections are opened, closed, or an exception occurs. This allows applications to be informed of changes to TCP connections using the normal Spring ApplicationListener mechanism.

AbstractTcpConnection has been renamed TcpConnectionSupport; custom connections that are subclasses of this class, can use its methods to publish events. Similarly, AbstractTcpConnectionInterceptor has been renamed to TcpConnectionInterceptorSupport.

In addition, a new <int-ip:tcp-connection-event-inbound-channel-adapter/> is provided; by default, this adapter sends all TcpConnectionEvents to a Channel.

Further, the TCP Connection Factories, now provide a new method getOpenConnectionIds(), which returns a list of identifiers for all open connections; this allows applications, for example, to broadcast to all open connections.

Finally, the connection factories also provide a new method closeConnection(String connectionId) which allows applications to explicitly close a connection using its ID.

For more information see Section 16.5, “TCP Connection Events”.

Building on the 2.2 SyslogToMapTransformer Spring Integration 3.0 now introduces UDP and TCP inbound channel adapters especially tailored for receiving SYSLOG messages. For more information, see Chapter 27, Syslog Support.

A new <int-jmx:tree-polling-channel-adapter/> is provided; this adapter queries the JMX MBean tree and sends a message with a payload that is the graph of objects that matches the query. By default the MBeans are mapped to primitives and simple Objects like Map, List and arrays - permitting simple transformation, for example, to JSON Section 8.1, “JMX Support”.

File 'tail'ing inbound channel adapters are now provided to generate messages when lines are added to the end of text files. Section 12.2.1, “'Tail'ing Files”.

A new IntegrationEvaluationContextFactoryBean is provided to allow configuration of custom PropertyAccessors and functions for use in SpEL expressions throughout the framework. For more information see Appendix A, Spring Expression Language (SpEL).

To customize the SpEL EvaluationContext with static Method functions the new <spel-function/> component is introduced. For more information see Section A.3, “SpEL Functions”.

AbstractCorrelatingMessageHandler provides a new property empty-group-min-timeout to allow empty group expiry to run on a longer schedule than expiring partial groups. Empty groups will not be removed from the MessageStore until they have not been modified for at least this number of milliseconds. For more information see Section 5.4.4, “Configuring an Aggregator”.

Previously, when a <filter/> had a <request-handler-advice-chain/>, the discard action was all performed within the scope of the advice chain (including any downstream flow on the discard-channel). The filter element now has an attribute discard-within-advice (default true), to allow the discard action to be performed after the advice chain completes. See Section 7.7.4, “Advising Filters”.

Request Handler Advice Chains can now be configured using annotations. See Section 7.7.5, “Advising Endpoints Using Annotations”.

This transformer now correctly transforms byte[] and char[] payloads to String. For more information see Section 6.1, “Transformer”.

Web Service Outbound Gateway 'uri' attribute now supports <uri-variable/> substitution for all URI-schemes supported by Spring Web Services. For more information see Section 29.4, “Outbound URI Configuration”.

The FTP, SFTP and FTPS endpoints no longer cache sessions by default.

The deprecated cached-sessions attribute has been removed from all endpoints. Previously, the embedded caching mechanism controlled by this attribute's value didn't provide a way to limit the size of the cache, which could grow indefinitely. The CachingConnectionFactory was introduced in release 2.1 and it became the preferred (and is now the only) way to cache sessions. For more information, see Section 13.6, “FTP Session Caching” and Section 25.3, “SFTP Session Caching”.

Previously, there was no way to override the default filter used to process files retrieved from a remote server. The filter attribute determines which files are retrieved but the FileReadingMessageSource uses an AcceptOnceFileListFilter. This means that if a new copy of a file is retrieved, with the same name as a previously copied file, no message was sent from the adapter.

With this release, a new attribute local-filter allows you to override the default filter, for example with an AcceptAllFileListFilter, or some other custom filter.

For users that wish the behavior of the AcceptOnceFileListFilter to be maintained across JVM executions, a custom filter that retains state, perhaps on the file system, can now be configured.

The gateways now support the mv command, enabling the renaming of remote files.

Spring Integration 3.0 adds a new set of DDL scripts for MySQL version 5.6.4 and higher. Now MySQL supports fractional seconds and is thus improving the FIFO ordering when polling from a MySQL-based Message Store. For more information, please see Section 17.4.1, “The Generic JDBC Message Store”.

A new abstraction for JSON conversion has been introduced. Implementations for Jackson 1.x and Jackson 2 are currently provided, with the version being determined by presence on the classpath. Previously, only Jackson 1.x was supported. For more information, see 'JSON Transformers' in Section 6.1, “Transformer”.

<http:outbound-gateway/> and <http:outbound-channel-adapter/> now provide an encode-uri attribute to allow disabling the encoding of the URI object before sending the request. For more information see Chapter 15, HTTP Support.

Previously, the <int-amqp:outbound-gateway/> mapped headers before invoking the message converter, and the converter could overwrite headers such as content-type. The outbound adapter maps the headers after the conversion, which means headers like content-type from the outbound Message (if present) are used.

Starting with this release, the gateway now maps the headers after the message conversion, consistent with the adapter. If your application relies on the previous behavior (where the converter's headers overrode the mapped headers), you either need to filter those headers (before the message reaches the gateway) or set them appropriately. The headers affected by the SimpleMessageConverter are content-type and content-encoding. Custom message converters may set other headers.

Previously, the id attribute for elements within a <chain> was ignored and, in some cases, disallowed. Now, the id attribute is allowed for all elements within a <chain>. The bean names of chain elements is a combination of the surrounding chain's id and the id of the element itself. For example: 'fooChain$child.fooTransformer.handler'. For more information see Section 5.6, “Message Handler Chain”.

Previously, when configuring a <message-driven-channel-adapter/>, if you wished to use a specific TaskExecutor, it was necessary to declare a container bean and provide it to the adapter using the container attribute. The task-executor is now provided, allowing it to be set directly on the adapter. This is in addition to several other container attributes that were already available.

The RMI Inbound Gateway now supports an error-channel attribute. See Section 24.3, “Inbound RMI”.

For more complex database-specific types, not supported by the standard CallableStatement.getObject method, 2 new additional attributes were introduced to the <sql-parameter-definition/> element with OUT-direction:

For more information see Section 17.5, “Stored Procedures”.

Previously, if an IMAP idle connection failed, it was logged but there was no mechanism to inform an application. Such exceptions now generate ApplicationEvents. Applications can obtain these events using an <int-event:inbound-channel-adapter> or any ApplicationListener configured to receive an ImapIdleExceptionEvent or one of its super classes.

Previously, message ids were generated using the JDK UUID.randomUUID() method. With this release, the default mechanism has been changed to use the com.eaio.uuid package which generates Type 1 UUIDs, and is significantly faster. In addition, the ability to change the strategy used to generate message ids has been added. For more information see the section called “Message ID Generation”.

The TCP connection factories now enable the configuration of a flexible mechanism to transfer selected headers (as well as the payload) over TCP. A new TcpMessageMapper enables the selection of the headers, and an appropriate (de)serializer needs to be configured to write the resulting Map to the TCP stream. A MapJsonSerializer is provided as a convenient mechanism to transfer headers and payload over TCP. For more information see Section 16.8.4, “Transferring Headers”.

All Outbound Gateways (e.g. <jdbc:outbound-gateway/> or <jms:outbound-gateway/>) are designed for 'request-reply' scenarios. A response is expected from the external service and will be published to the reply-channel, or the replyChannel message header. However, there are some cases where the external system might not always return a result, e.g. a <jdbc:outbound-gateway/>, when a SELECT ends with an empty ResultSet or, say, a Web Service is One-Way. An option is therefore needed to configure whether or not a reply is required. For this purpose, the requires-reply attribute has been introduced for Outbound Gateway components. In most cases, the default value for requires-reply is true and, if there is not any result, a ReplyRequiredException will be thrown. Changing the value to false means that, if an external service doesn't return anything, the message-flow will end at that point, similar to an Outbound Channel Adapter.

Note

The WebService outbound gateway has an additional attribute ignore-empty-responses; this is used to treat an empty String response as if no response was received. It is true by default but can be set to false to allow the application to receive an empty String in the reply message payload. When the attribute is true an empty string is treated as no response for the purposes of the requires-reply attribute. requires-reply is false by default for the WebService outbound gateway.

Note, the requiresReply property was previously present in the AbstractReplyProducingMessageHandler but set to false, and there wasn't any way to configure it on Outbound Gateways using the XML namespace.

	Important
	Previously, a gateway receiving no reply would silently end the flow (with a DEBUG log message); with this change an exception will now be thrown by default by most gateways. To revert to the previous behavior, set requires-reply to false.

Previously, the <delayer> provided a delay-header-name attribute to determine the delay value at runtime. In complex cases it was necessary to precede the <delayer> with a <header-enricher>. Spring Integration 3.0 introduced the expression attribute and expression sub-element for dynamic delay determination. The delay-header-name attribute is now deprecated because the header evaluation can be specified in the expression. In addition, the ignore-expression-failures was introduced to control the behavior when an expression evaluation fails. For more information see Section 7.4, “Delayer”.

Previously, 'If-Modified-Since' and 'If-Unmodified-Since' HTTP headers were incorrectly processed within from/to HTTP headers mapping in the DefaultHttpHeaderMapper. Now, in addition to the fix of that issue, DefaultHttpHeaderMapper provides date parsing from formatted strings for HTTP headers, which accept date-time values. For more information see Chapter 15, HTTP Support.

Previously, sending to a <publish-subscribe-channel/> that had no subscribers would return a false result. If used in conjunction with a MessagingTemplate, this would result in an exception being thrown. Now, the PublishSubscribeChannel has a property minSubscribers (default 0). If the message is sent to at least the minimum number of subscribers, the send is deemed to be successful (even if zero). If an application is expecting to get an exception under these conditions, set the minimum subscribers to at least 1.