Spring Retry

Background

Spring retry is an easy way to add retry to your Spring application.

Spring Boot Implementation

Assuming this is a Spring Boot application,

1. Add spring-retry and spring-boot-starter-aop as dependencies.
2. Add @EnableRetry annotation to any @Configuration class. Adding it to the main spring boot class is fine as well.
3. Add @Retryable to any method in you code that you want to be retried on failure.
   • value or include: List of exceptions to retry on.
   • exclude: List of exceptions to not retry on.
   • maxAttempts: Number of retry attempts
   • backoff: Backoff retry properties (time to wait between retries).
   • When using spring retry 1.3+ you can pass a recover param that takes the name of the recover function. Last I checked, Spring retry javadocs past 1.2.2 are not online so need to check maven and download the javadocs for latest version.
4. Add @Recover to a function that defines the fallback behavior.
   • This is invoked when all retries failed. You could for example, log that all retries failed and return a error response entity.

Example

public class SpringRetryScratch {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Spring retry code showcase - note this will not run unless you bootstrap a spring or spring boot application");
        executeTask();
    }
    @Retryable(include = {RuntimeException.class}, maxAttempts = 3, backoff = @Backoff(delay = 2000L), recover = "handleTaskFailed")
    private static void executeTask(){
        throw new RuntimeException("failed");
        //System.out.println("Invoked operation");
    }
    @Recover
    private static void handleTaskFailed(){
        System.out.println("executeTask exhausted all retries. Sending email...");
    }
}

More Reading:

• Only official documentation (readme): https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-retry
• Choosing recover method: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-retry/issues/188