StepExecution executionContext from ItemWriter not visible from JobExecution

Hi ,

I am a Spring-batch newbie.

I have job which has 2 steps:
[1] listing of files in a directory
[2] writing these files into a separate location, and a database insert/indexing


Step2 takes a fair amount of time.I am using a CustomWriter that implements ItemWriter for step2. Apart from the item readCount which happens implicitly during the ItemWriter write() , I calculate the size of the file and wish that to be available at a later point of time. So I decided to implement the ItemStream interface in my CustomWriter class to store the custom value in the ExecutionContext of the step.

Now the place where I launch the Job, i have a JobExplorer reference to retrieve the JobExecution. I launch the Job, wait for a while, and then retrieve the jobExecution and the StepExecutions within it. I was surprised to find that the custom values I had populated in the ItemWriter do not show up when introspecting the JobExecution's StepExecutions.

Instead of implementing the ItemStream interface, I tried the StepExecutionlistener interface too, but the effect was the same. i could see the value inserted in the StepExecution's executionContext in the CustomWriter, but it did not show up when I browsed the jobExecution in another class.

I am at a loss how to solve this.
Any help or pointers will be much appreciated.

thanks in advance,
Eric.