STS support for error-channel link & visualizing multi-source integration-graph

[tsimon]

Hi,

I recently started to experiment with Spring Integration. My development environment consists of EclipseIDE v3.6 with STS v2.8.2.

During project prototyping, I noticed a few issues with the visual editor:

1. I am using a JMS message-driven channel adapter to receive MQ messages over JMS. It has a custom message-converter and an error-channel reference in case the conversion fails - looks like the error-channel link is missing from the graph.

2. In case one implements a complex integration flow, it probably makes sense to break down the large flow into multiple configuration files (ie. toplevel.flow.xml imports subflow1.flow.xml, subflow2.flow.xml etc). Unfortunately this breaks the graph representation as well. It would make sense to show some sort of whole/part graph visualization (in the Outline view, for example), to better understand the flow structure.

It might be that the above points were addressed in later releases, I did not go through all the change logs since STS v2.8.2. Could you please confirm if these issues still exist in the latest release? If not, do you have plans to address them?


Best regards,
Tamas

[ldossantos]

Hello Tamas. Thanks for the input

1. I just checked, and the visual editor does not display error-channel references for any inbound or outbound channel adapters. This was a design decision recommended to us from the Spring Integration team. I'll get it in touch with somebody on the team to see if it's time to re-evaluate that decision.

2. Unfortunately we still don't support visualizing an SI application across multiple configuration files. This has been requested before and there's a ticket open for the feature, but there's on ETA for when we'll be able to get it done.

https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-1618

[tsimon]

Thanks for the reply.

I guess the error-channel link is a minor issue because it could be fixed by exporting the graph and manually editing the image. Still, the graph is not accurate without that linkage.

Looking at the linked JIRA issue, I am glad other developers would be keen on seeing this improvement as well.