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15.2.2. Differences Between a Gateway Listener and a Normal Listener

A gateway behaves similarly to an ESB-aware listener. However, there are some important differences:
  • Gateway classes can pick up arbitrary objects contained in files, JMS messages, SQL tables and so forth (each 'gateway class' is specialized for a specific transport), whereas JBossESB listeners can only process JBossESB normalized Messages as described in “The Message” section of this document. However, those Messages can contain arbitrary data.
  • Only one action class is invoked to perform the 'message composing' action. ESB listeners are able to execute an action processing pipeline.
  • Objects that are 'picked up' are used to invoke a single 'composer class' (the action) that will return an ESB message object. This will then be delivered to a target service that must be ESB-aware. The target service defined at configuration time will be translated at runtime into an EPR (or a list of EPRs) by the registry. The EPR returned by the registry is similar to the 'toEPR' contained in the header of ESB Messages. However, because incoming objects are 'ESB-unaware' with no dynamic way to determine the toEPR, this value is provided to the gateway at configuration time and included in all outgoing messages.
    There are a few off-the-shelf composer classes; the default 'file' composer class will just package the file contents into the message body. The same process occurs for JMS messages. The default message composing class for an SQL table row is to package contents of all columns specified in the configuration, into a java.util.Map.
    Although these default composer classes will be adequate for most uses, you can also provide your own. The only requirements are that they must have a constructor that takes a single ConfigTree argument, and that they must provide a 'Message composing' method (whereby the default name is 'process' but this can be configured differently in the 'process' attribute of the <action> element within the ConfigTree provided at constructor time). The processing method must take a single argument of type object, and return a message value.
    The FileGateway accepts the file-filter-class configuration attribute which allows you to define a FileFilter implementation that may be used to select the files used by the gateway in question. Initialization of user-defined FileFilter instances is performed by the gateway. If the instance is also of type org.jboss.soa.esb.listeners.gateway.FileGatewayListener.FileFilterInit, the init method will be called and passed to the gateway ConfigTree instance.
    By default, the FileFilter implementations are defined and used by the FileGateway. If an input suffix is defined in the configuration, files matching that suffix will be returned. Alternatively, if there is no input suffix, any file is accepted as long as it does not match the work suffix, error suffix and post suffix.