Event Handling in Spring

You have seen in all the chapters that the core of Spring is the ApplicationContext, which manages the complete life cycle of the beans. The ApplicationContext publishes certain types of events when loading the beans. For example, a ContextStartedEvent is published when the context is started and ContextStoppedEvent is published when the context is stopped.

Event handling in the ApplicationContext is provided through the ApplicationEvent class and ApplicationListener interface. Hence, if a bean implements the ApplicationListener, then every time an ApplicationEvent gets published to the ApplicationContext, that bean is notified.

Standard Events

Spring provides the following standard events −

Spring's event handling is single-threaded so if an event is published, until and unless all the receivers get the message, the processes are blocked and the flow will not continue. Hence, care should be taken when designing your application if the event handling is to be used.

Listening to Context Events

To listen to a context event, a bean should implement the ApplicationListener interface which has just one method onApplicationEvent(). So let us write an example to see how the events propagates and how you can put your code to do required task based on certain events.

Let us have a working Eclipse IDE in place and take the following steps to create a Spring application −

HelloWorld.java

package com.tutorialspoint;

public class HelloWorld {
   private String message;

   public void setMessage(String message){
      this.message  = message;
   }
   public void getMessage(){
      System.out.println("Your Message : " + message);
   }
}

StartEventHandler.java

package com.tutorialspoint;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationListener;
import org.springframework.context.event.ContextStartedEvent;

public class StartEventHandler 
   implements ApplicationListener<ContextStartedEvent>{

   public void onApplicationEvent(ContextStartedEvent event) {
      System.out.println("ContextStartedEvent Received");
   }
}

StopEventHandler.java

package com.tutorialspoint;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationListener;
import org.springframework.context.event.ContextStoppedEvent;

public class StopEventHandler 
   implements ApplicationListener<ContextStoppedEvent>{

   public void onApplicationEvent(ContextStoppedEvent event) {
      System.out.println("ContextStoppedEvent Received");
   }
}

MainApp.java

package com.tutorialspoint;

import org.springframework.context.ConfigurableApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

public class MainApp {
   public static void main(String[] args) {
      ConfigurableApplicationContext context = 
         new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("Beans.xml");

      // Let us raise a start event.
      context.start();
	  
      HelloWorld obj = (HelloWorld) context.getBean("helloWorld");
      obj.getMessage();

      // Let us raise a stop event.
      context.stop();
   }
}

Beans.xml

<?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "UTF-8"?>

<beans xmlns = "http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:xsi = "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation = "http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd">

   <bean id = "helloWorld" class = "com.tutorialspoint.HelloWorld">
      <property name = "message" value = "Hello World!"/>
   </bean>

   <bean id = "cStartEventHandler" class = "com.tutorialspoint.StartEventHandler"/>
   <bean id = "cStopEventHandler" class = "com.tutorialspoint.StopEventHandler"/>

</beans>

Output

Once you are done creating the source and bean configuration files, let us run the application. If everything is fine with your application, it will print the following message −

ContextStartedEvent Received
Your Message : Hello World!
ContextStoppedEvent Received

If you like, you can publish your own custom events and later you can capture the same to take any action against those custom events. If you are interested in writing your own custom events, you can check Custom Events in Spring.