Spring Integration and AMQP: How to gracefully handle deserialization exceptions? - rabbitmq

Question

I use RabbitMQ and Spring Integration to handle incoming JSON messages.
The relevant part of the configuration looks something like this:
<amqp:inbound-channel-adapter channel="incomingChannel" queue-names="..."
message-converter="jsonConverter" error-handler="errorHandler"
error-channel="errorChannel" />
I'm using Jackson Databind as the JSON converter.
Sometimes the incoming JSON messages have an incorrect syntax. This results in the following (correct) exception:
org.springframework.amqp.rabbit.listener.ListenerExecutionFailedException: Listener threw exception
Caused by: org.springframework.amqp.support.converter.MessageConversionException: Failed to convert Message content
Caused by: com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException: Can not deserialize instance of java.lang.String out of START_ARRAY token...
The exception is then handled by the errorHandler which simply is a MessagePublishingErrorHandler to errorChannel.
So far so good. The problem is, that the message is still being rejected by the AMQP client, although I am handling it with an error handler. RabbitMQ then redelivers the message over and over. Even configuring a dead letter queue did not help. Any ideas how to handle this scenario correctly?
Exceptions further down the processing (after successful deserialization) are handled just fine: AMQP message acknowledged and error message sent to errorChannel.
Any ideas?
Library versions:
Spring Integration: 3.0.1
Spring Framework: 4.0.2
Jackson Databind: 2.3.1

Answer 1

You can set defaultRequeueRejected=false on the listener container.
The attribute is not currently exposed on the channel adapter, but you can define the container as a <bean... class="...SimpleMessageListenerContainer"/> and inject it into adapter using the listener-container attribute.
Or, use a custom ErrorHandler that throws an AmqpRejectAndDontRequeueException.