How to get the depth of a channel

I am using a pollable channel in my java code as follows:

ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("com.mydirectory/integration.xml");
channel = (PollableChannel) context.getBean("annotatorChannel");

Then in one of my methods, I do:

channel.send(MessageBuilder.withPayload(auditEvent ).build());

I want to check the depth of this channel before I execute the above line of code. Is there a way to do this?

My integration.xml file has the following lines which are relevant to this:

<int:channel id="annotatorChannel" datatype="com.mypackage.AuditEvent">
<int:queue capacity="1000" />
<int:interceptors>
<int:ref bean="persistenceInterceptor"/>
</int:interceptors>
</int:channel>


So is there a way in java code to see what depth ( or number of events) the queue has reached before I do:

channel.send(MessageBuilder.withPayload(auditEvent ).build());

as mentioned above.

So basically I want to check the lenght of the channel(queue) and if it has exceeded 1000, then I want to throw an excpetion. Maybe something like this:

if (channel.length >= 1000)
throw exception;
else
channel.send(MessageBuilder.withPayload(auditEvent ).build());

but I am not sure how to get the number of events currently in the channel queue.

I figured it out... I was previously using channel as a PollableChannel object. I changed it to use QueueChannel, and now I can use the getMesssageCount() method to determine the depth of the queue.