Spring Events
1. Overview
In this article, we'll be discussing how to use events in Spring.
Events are one of the more overlooked functionalities in the framework but also one of the more useful. And – like many other things in Spring – event publishing is one of the capabilities provided by ApplicationContext.
There are a few simple guidelines to follow:
the event should extend
ApplicationEvent
the publisher should inject an
ApplicationEventPublisher
objectthe listener should implement the
ApplicationListener
interface
2. A Custom Event
Spring allows us to create and publish custom events which – by default – are synchronous. This has a few advantages – such as, for example, the listener being able to participate in the publisher’s transaction context.
2.1. A Simple Application Event
Let’s create a simple event class – just a placeholder to store the event data. In this case, the event class holds a String message:
2.2. A Publisher
Now let’s create a publisher of that event. The publisher constructs the event object and publishes it to anyone who's listening.
To publish the event, the publisher can simply inject the ApplicationEventPublisher
and use the publishEvent()
API:
Alternatively, the publisher class can implement the ApplicationEventPublisherAware
interface – this will also inject the event publisher on the application start-up. Usually, it's simpler to just inject the publisher with @Autowire.
2.3. A Listener
Finally, let's create the listener.
The only requirement for the listener is to be a bean and implement ApplicationListener
interface:
Notice how our custom listener is parametrized with the generic type of custom event – which makes the onApplicationEvent() method type-safe. This also avoids having to check if the object is an instance of a specific event class and casting it.
And, as already discussed – by default spring events are synchronous – the doStuffAndPublishAnEvent()
method blocks until all listeners finish processing the event.
3. Creating Asynchronous Events(异步)
In some cases, publishing events synchronously isn't really what we're looking for – we may need async handling of our events.
You can turn that on in the configuration by creating an ApplicationEventMulticaster
bean with an executor; for our purposes here simpleAsyncTaskExecutor
works well:
The event, the publisher, and the listener implementations remain the same as before – but now, the listener will asynchronously deal with the event in a separate thread.
4. Existing Framework Events
Spring itself publishes a variety of events out of the box. For example, the ApplicationContext will fire various framework events. E.g. ContextRefreshedEvent, ContextStartedEvent, RequestHandledEvent
etc.
These events provide application developers an option to hook into the lifecycle of the application and the context and add in their own custom logic where needed.
Here's a quick example of a listener listening for context refreshes:
To learn more about existing framework events, have a look at our next tutorial here.
5. Annotation-Driven Event Listener(注解)
Starting with Spring 4.2, an event listener is not required to be a bean implementing the ApplicationListener
interface – it can be registered on any public
method of a managed bean via the @EventListener
annotation:
As before, the method signature declares the event type it consumes.
By default, the listener is invoked synchronously
. However, we can easily make it asynchronous by adding an @Async
annotation. We must remember to enable Async support in the application, though.
6. Generics Support
It is also possible to dispatch events with generics information in the event type.
6.1. A Generic Application Event
Let's create a generic event type. In our example, the event class holds any content and a success status indicator:
Notice the difference between GenericSpringEvent
and CustomSpringEvent
. We now have the flexibility to publish any arbitrary event and it's not required to extend from ApplicationEvent
anymore.
6.2. A Listener
Now let’s create a listener of that event. We could define the listener by implementing the ApplicationListener
interface like before:
But unfortunately, this definition requires us to inherit GenericSpringEvent
from the ApplicationEvent
class. So for this tutorial, let's make use of an annotation-driven event listener discussed previously.
It is also possible to make the event listener conditional by defining a boolean SpEL expression on the @EventListener
annotation. In this case, the event handler will only be invoked for a successful GenericSpringEvent
of String:
The Spring Expression Language (SpEL) is a powerful expression language that's covered in detail in another tutorial.
6.3. A Publisher
The event publisher is similar to the one described above. But due to type erasure, we need to publish an event that resolves the generics parameter we would filter on. For example, class GenericStringSpringEvent extends GenericSpringEvent<String>
.
And there's an alternative way of publishing events. If we return a non-null value from a method annotated with @EventListener
as the result, Spring Framework will send that result as a new event for us. Moreover, we can publish multiple new events by returning them in a collection as the result of event processing.
7. Transaction Bound Events
This paragraph is about using the @TransactionalEventListener
annotation. To learn more about transaction management check out the Transactions with Spring and JPA tutorial.
Since Spring 4.2, the framework provides a new @TransactionalEventListener
annotation, which is an extension of @EventListener
, that allows binding the listener of an event to a phase of the transaction. Binding is possible to the following transaction phases:
AFTER_COMMIT
(default) is used to fire the event if the transaction has completed successfullyAFTER_ROLLBACK
– if the transaction has rolled backAFTER_COMPLETION
– if the transaction has completed (an alias for AFTER_COMMIT and AFTER_ROLLBACK)BEFORE_COMMIT
is used to fire the event right before transaction commit
Here's a quick example of transactional event listener:
This listener will be invoked only if there's a transaction in which the event producer is running and it's about to be committed.
And, if no transaction is running the event isn’t sent at all unless we override this by setting fallbackExecution
attribute to true.
8. Conclusion
In this quick tutorial, we went over the basics of dealing with events in Spring – creating a simple custom event, publishing it, and then handling it in a listener.
We also had a brief look at how to enable the asynchronous processing of events in the configuration.
Then we learned about improvements introduced in Spring 4.2, such as annotation-driven listeners, better generics support, and events binding to transaction phases.
As always, the code presented in this article is available over on Github. This is a Maven-based project, so it should be easy to import and run as it is.
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