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Message Converters

SmallRye Reactive Messaging supports message converters, allowing to transform an incoming message into a version accepted by the method. If the incoming messages or payload does not match the invoked method’s expectation, SmallRye Reactive Messaging looks for a suitable converter. If found, it converts the incoming message with this converter.

Converters can have multiple purposes, but the main use case is about transforming the message’s payload:

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@ApplicationScoped
public class MyConverter implements MessageConverter {
    @Override
    public boolean canConvert(Message<?> in, Type target) {
        // Checks whether this converter can be used to convert
        // the incoming message into a message containing a payload
        // of the type `target`.
        return in.getPayload().getClass().equals(String.class)
                && target.equals(Person.class);
    }

    @Override
    public Message<?> convert(Message<?> in, Type target) {
        // Convert the incoming message into the new message.
        // It's important to build the new message **from**
        // the received one.
        return in.withPayload(new Person((String) in.getPayload()));
    }
}

To provide a converter, implement a bean exposing the MessageConverter interface. The canConvert method is called during the lookup and verifies if it can handle the conversion. The target type is the expected payload type. If the converter returns true to canConvert, SmallRye Reactive Messaging calls the convert method to proceed to the conversion.

The previous converter can be used in application like the following, to convert Message<String> to Message<Person>:

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@Outgoing("persons")
public Multi<String> source() {
    return Multi.createFrom().items("Neo", "Morpheus", "Trinity");
}

// The messages need to be converted as they are emitted as Message<String>
// and consumed as Message<Person>
@Incoming("persons")
public void consume(Person p) {
    // ...
}

Converters work for all supported method signatures. However, the signature must be well-formed to allow the extraction of the expected payload type. Wildcards and raw types do not support conversion. If the expected payload type cannot be extracted, or no converter fits, the message is passed as received.

If multiple suitable converters are present, implementations should override the getPriority method returning the priority. The default priority is 100. The converter lookup invokes converters with higher priority first.