Which way of specifiying my beans in spring-integration.xml is better?

Question

I have two different ways of declaring a spring integration bean. They both seem to work. I'm using the Spring STS Eclipse based IDE.

This way:

<bean id="int-ftp:request-handler-advice-chain"
        class="org.springframework.integration.handler.advice.ExpressionEvaluatingRequestHandlerAdvice">
        <property name="trapException" value="true"></property>
        <property name="onFailureExpression" value="#root"></property>
        <property name="failureChannel" ref="errorChannel"></property>
</bean>

or this way:

<int-ftp:request-handler-advice-chain>
    <bean class="org.springframework.integration.handler.advice.ExpressionEvaluatingRequestHandlerAdvice">
        <property name="trapException" value="true" />
        <property name="onFailureExpression" value="#root" />
        <property name="failureChannel" ref="errorChannel" />
    </bean>
</int-ftp:request-handler-advice-chain>

Which way is better?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 03 '16 at 01:06

For the target <int-ftp:outbound-gateway> it doesn't matter. Works well, as you noticed already.

Only the difference that the second declaration is nested and the final bean is visible only from the <int-ftp:request-handler-advice-chain> context.

The first definition is top-level global bean, which is visible everywhere and can be reused from other bean as well.

You can find more info about Inner Beans in the Spring Framework.

Which way of specifiying my beans in spring-integration.xml is better?

1 Answers1