Working with Inbound Endpoints

An inbound endpoint is a message entry point that can inject messages directly from the transport layer to the mediation layer, without going through the Axis engine. The following diagram illustrates the inbound endpoint architecture.

Out of the existing transports only the HTTP transport supports multi-tenancy, this is one limitation that is overcome with the introduction of the inbound architecture. Another limitation when it comes to conventional Axis2 based transports is that the transports do not support dynamic configurations. With inbound endpoints, it is possible to create inbound messaging channels dynamically, and there is also built-in cluster coordination as well as multi-tenancy support for all transports.

Based on the protocol, the behaviour of an inbound endpoint can either be listening, polling or event-based.

For detailed information on listening, polling and event-based inbound endpoints see the following topics:

For information on how to create a custom inbound endpoint based on your requirement, see Custom Inbound Endpoint.

Following is a sample inbound endpoint configuration:

<inboundEndpoint xmlns="http://ws.apache.org/ns/synapse"
                name="HttpListenerEP"
                sequence="TestIn"
                onError="fault"
                protocol="http"
                suspend="false">
  <parameters>
     <parameter name="inbound.http.port">8085</parameter>
  </parameters>
</inboundEndpoint>

In an inbound endpoint configuration, the common inbound endpoint parameters are specified as attributes of the <inboundEndpoint> element whereas the protocol specific parameters are specified as <parameter> elements.

Common inbound endpoint parameters

The following parameters are common to all inbound endpoints:

Parameter Name	Description	Required	Possible Values	Default Value
sequential	The behavior when executing the given sequence. When set as `true`, mediation will happen within the same thread. When set as `false`, the mediation engine will use the inbound thread pool. (The default thread pool values can be found in the `<ESB_HOME>/repository/conf/synapse.properties` file).	Yes	true or false	true
suspend	When set to `true`, this makes the inbound endpoint inactive.	Yes	true or false	false

Specifying inbound endpoint parameters as registry values

Other than specifying parameter values inline, you can also specify parameter values as registry entries. The advantage of specifying a parameter value as a registry entry is that the same inbound endpoint configuration can be used in different environments simply by changing the registry entry value.

<inboundEndpoint xmlns="http://ws.apache.org/ns/synapse" name="file" sequence="request" onError="fault" protocol="file" suspend="false">
   <parameters>
      ...............
      <parameter name="transport.vfs.FileURI" key="conf:/repository/esb/esb-configurations/test"/>
      ...............
   </parameters>
</inboundEndpoint>

If you need to provide the registry entry value via the Management Console, specify it as $registry:conf:/repository/esb/esb-configurations/test.