Can we log per spring Integration flow? - spring

Spring integration really helps us a lot during application integration, it make us more focus on flow design.
However we have an requirement to have logs per integration flow, any suggestions how to achieve this? Currently we use <int:message-history/> for logging.
in our case, each integration flow is one spring-context.xml, and we load one spring-context.xml with a separated ApplicationContext, actually we want each ApplicationContext has its own log file, this will greatly help us for issue tracking
As we have many integration flows, so currently all logs are in one log file, so it is not easy for us to find the log we want, and it is difficult for us to trace the message history.
Thanks.

Related

Trying to create a "general" logging solution for requests in Spring Boot

I'm currently trying to create a info log for every request in the API I'm working on, but instead of creating a log for every request at the controller level, I wanted to try creating a "catch all" solution but I'm not being able to fullfill my goals.
I've decided to start the idea using Spring's #Aspect annotation, but using it isn't the best idea because I'd have to create one aspect for every controller that I have.
After some digging I found 2 possible solution paths that I could try to work on, #ControllerAdvice and creating an interceptor (which in theory is the one idea that I think has the most chances of succeeding and being a clean solution).
The problem is that I'm not being able to find much information regarding these ideas.
For the #ControllerAdvice idea I'm only finding it being used to handle exceptions, and for the interceptor idea I'm not finding anything similar to what I want to create.
Are these ideas feasible at all? Or should I just stick to logging everything at controller level?
Not sure if it's important but I'm currently working using LogBack library.
There is a ready solution for complete request and response logging for different client- and server-side technologies.
I'm using logbook tool for tracking request-response info for my rest endpoints.
https://github.com/zalando/logbook

Spring Integration Invoking Spring Batch

Just looking for some information if others have solved this pattern. I want to use Spring Integration and Spring Batch together. Both of these are SpringBoot applications and ideally I'd like to keep them and their respective configuration separated, so they are both their own executable jar. I'm having problems executing them in their own process space and I believe I want, unless someone can convince me otherwise, each to run like they are their own Spring Boot app and initialize themselves with their own profiles and properties. What I'm having trouble with though is the invocation of the job in my SpringBatch project from my SpringIntegration project. At first I couldn't get the properties loaded from the batch project, so I realized I need to pass the spring.active.profiles as a Job Parameter and that seemed to solve that. But there are other things in the Spring Boot Batch application that aren't loading correctly like the schema-platform.sql file and the database isn't getting initialized, etc.
On this initial launch of the job I might want the response to go back to Spring Integration for some messaging on Job Status. There might be times when I want to run a job without Spring Integration kicking off the job, but still take advantage of sending statuses back to the Spring Integration project providing its listening on a channel or something.
I've reviewed quite a few Spring samples and have yet to find my exact scenario, most are with the two dependencies in the same project, so maybe I'm doing something that's not possible, but I'm sure I'm just missing a little something in the Spring configuration.
My questions/issues are:
I don't want the Spring Integration project to know anything about the SpringBatch configuration other than the job its kicking off. I have found a good way to do that reference to the Job Bean without getting my entire batch configuration loading.
Should I keep these two projects separated or would it be better to combine them since I have two-way communication between both.
How should the Job be launch from the integration project. We're using the spring-batch-integration project with JobLaunchRequest and JobLauncher. This seems to run it in the same process as the Spring Integration project and I'm missing a lot of my SpringBootBatch projects initialization
Should I be using a CommandLineRunner instead to force it to another process.
Is SpringApplication.run(BatchConfiguration.class) the answer?
Looking for some general project configuration setup to meet these requirements.
Spring Cloud Data Flow in combination with Spring Cloud Task does exactly what you're asking. It launches Spring Cloud Task applications (which can contain batch jobs) as new processes on the platform you choose. I'd encourage you to check out that project here: http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-dataflow/

Can someone explain the flow of execution of spring boot application?

I am working on a spring boot application.
I wanted to know what happens when the application started running and before it becomes ready for user interaction.
I tried going through the console logs but I am still unsure as to what happens when.
I believe you should elaborate a bit more your question. That's because you can build different types of applications using Spring Boot. In a nutshell, during the start up the application will basically try to load the "beans" defined in the related context(s), pre-configured components, define the active profile, properties files, etc. Also some Spring and application events are generated during the start up.
A good way to understand what's going on behind the scenes is running the application in DEBUG mode. By default, the log level of the application is set as INFO.
Have a look at this link for further details:
http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current-SNAPSHOT/reference/htmlsingle/#boot-features-spring-application
I hope this can help you as start point.

Activiti vs Spring batch

I have got a use case to implement. It's basically a workflow kind of use case. Below is the requirements
Extract and import data from an external db to an internal db
Make this imported data into different formats and supply it to multiple external systems and invoke some script there. The external interfaces are SFTP, SOAP, JDBC, Python over CORBA. There are around 14 external systems with one of these interfaces.
Interface transactions are executed in around 15 steps, with the ability to run some steps in parallel
These steps should be configurable. ie, a particular flow may execute 10 of these 15 steps and another flow executes 15 of 15 steps
Should have the ability to restart each step individually or restart from a particular step
There are some steps that are manual and completion of manual step should trigger next step
Volume of data is not that large. Total data size is around 400k records. But this process is executing for around 30k records at a time. Time for development is less and we are looking for some light weight easy to learn and implement solution.
We are looking for Spring based or Spring integratable solutions.
The solutions we considered are
For workflow:
Activiti, Spring Batch
For interfaces:
Spring Integration
My question is
Can Spring batch considered for managing a work flow kind of use case? I don't think it's a best fit use case for Spring Batch but as its simple and easy to implement looked for its scope. We considered doing the interfaces interaction as each step in a batch job and inside the tasklet do the Spring Integration for external interfaces, with few issues as far as I understand are
a) Dynamic step configuration can be done with Java configuration, but how flexible it is and is it recommended?
b) Manual step processing is not possible in Spring Batch
Is there any work around for this? Is there any other issues or performance impacts on doing this?
Activiti seems to a solution. Can you please provide some feedback on Activiti with Spring and Spring integration for this use case and ease of implementing it? And support for Activiti
Can Activiti workflows restarted from a particular task? Is a task can be rollbacked?
Welcoming any suggestions !!
1) For managing workflows, Activiti would be a great choice. They have created a really good process engine which should comply your needs for delegating your tasks as well as calling your custom logic. Moreover, it is based entirely on Spring Framework so Integration with your logic would be easy.
2) i've provided the same in first answer.
3) No, you will have to create a new workflow for that and Yes!, a task can be rolled back.

Spring Integration as embedded alternative to standalone ESB

Does anybody has an experience with Spring Integration project as embedded ESB?
I'm highly interesting in such use cases as:
Reading files from directory on schedule basis
Getting data from JDBC data source
Modularity and possibility to start/stop/redeploy module on the fly (e.g. one module can scan directory on schedule basis, another call query from jdbc data source etc.)
repeat/retry policy
UPDATE:
I found answers on all my questions except "Getting data from JDBC data source". Is it technically possible?
Remember, "ESB" is just a marketing term designed to sell more expensive software, it's not a magic bullet. You need to consider the specific jobs you need your software to do, and pick accordingly. If Spring Integration seems to fit the bill, I wouldn't be too concerned if it doesn't look much like an uber-expensive server installation.
The Spring Integration JDBC adapters are available in 2.0, and we just released GA last week. Here's the relevant section from the reference manual: http://static.springsource.org/spring-integration/docs/latest-ga/reference/htmlsingle/#jdbc
This link describes the FileSucker with Spring Integration. Read up on your Enterprise Integration patterns for more info I think.
I kinda think you need to do a bit more investigation your self, or do a couple of tries on some of your usecases. Then we can discuss whats good and bad
JDBC Adapters appear to be a work in progress.
Even if there is no specific adapter available, remember that Spring Integration is a thin wrapper around POJOs. You'll be able to access JDBC in any component e.g. your service activators.
See here for a solution based on a polling inbound channel adapter too.

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