2.4 The MessageBuilder Helper Class

You may notice that the Message interface defines retrieval methods for its payload and headers but no setters. The reason for this is that a Message cannot be modified after its initial creation. Therefore, when a Message instance is sent to multiple consumers (e.g. through a Publish Subscribe Channel), if one of those consumers needs to send a reply with a different payload type, it will need to create a new Message. As a result, the other consumers are not affected by those changes. Keep in mind, that multiple consumers may access the same payload instance or header value, and whether such an instance is itself immutable is a decision left to the developer. In other words, the contract for Messages is similar to that of an unmodifiable Collection, and the MessageHeaders' map further exemplifies that; even though the MessageHeaders class implements java.util.Map, any attempt to invoke a put operation (or 'remove' or 'clear') on the MessageHeaders will result in an UnsupportedOperationException.

Rather than requiring the creation and population of a Map to pass into the GenericMessage constructor, Spring Integration does provide a far more convenient way to construct Messages: MessageBuilder. The MessageBuilder provides two factory methods for creating Messages from either an existing Message or with a payload Object. When building from an existing Message, the headers and payload of that Message will be copied to the new Message:

Message<String> message1 = MessageBuilder.withPayload("test")
        .setHeader("foo", "bar")
        .build();

Message<String> message2 = MessageBuilder.fromMessage(message1).build();

assertEquals("test", message2.getPayload());
assertEquals("bar", message2.getHeaders().get("foo"));

If you need to create a Message with a new payload but still want to copy the headers from an existing Message, you can use one of the 'copy' methods.

Message<String> message3 = MessageBuilder.withPayload("test3")
        .copyHeaders(message1.getHeaders())
        .build();

Message<String> message4 = MessageBuilder.withPayload("test4")
        .setHeader("foo", 123)
        .copyHeadersIfAbsent(message1.getHeaders())
        .build();

assertEquals("bar", message3.getHeaders().get("foo"));
assertEquals(123, message4.getHeaders().get("foo"));

Notice that the copyHeadersIfAbsent does not overwrite existing values. Also, in the second example above, you can see how to set any user-defined header with setHeader. Finally, there are set methods available for the predefined headers as well as a non-destructive method for setting any header (MessageHeaders also defines constants for the pre-defined header names).

Message<Integer> importantMessage = MessageBuilder.withPayload(99)
        .setPriority(MessagePriority.HIGHEST)
        .build();

assertEquals(MessagePriority.HIGHEST, importantMessage.getHeaders().getPriority());

Message<Integer> anotherMessage = MessageBuilder.fromMessage(importantMessage)
        .setHeaderIfAbsent(MessageHeaders.PRIORITY, MessagePriority.LOW)
        .build();

assertEquals(MessagePriority.HIGHEST, anotherMessage.getHeaders().getPriority());

The MessagePriority is only considered when using a PriorityChannel (as described in the next chapter). It is defined as an enum with five possible values:

public enum MessagePriority {
    HIGHEST,
    HIGH,
    NORMAL,
    LOW,
    LOWEST
}