Aggregator at the end of process flow. Should the output channel be null?

[sashank]

I have an Aggregator at the dead end of my process flow after which I dont have any processing left and hence I skipped giving any output-channel in the configuration xml and I get an exception for this reason.

<int:aggregator input-channel="inputchannel"
correlation-strategy="CorrelationStrategyBean"
correlation-strategy-method="correlate"
ref="loadAggregatorBean" method="aggregate"
release-strategy="ReleaseStrategyBean"
release-strategy-method="release"
send-partial-result-on-expiry="true"
send-timeout="100">
</int:aggregator>

Is there anyway I can configure an Aggregator without an output-channel.

[Mark Fisher]

You can always add "nullChannel" as the output-channel. That's essentially dev/null (it does log at debug level).

[sashank]

Mark,
Inspite of adding the output-channel="nullChannel" to the Aggregator configuration, I get the exception

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: payload must not be null

Not sure of it is related but I see a similar issue here https://jira.springsource.org/browse/INT-572 for Transformers however the status is fixed.