Sometimes there is some business processing that you know you want to repeat every time it happens. The classic example of this is the optimization of a message pipeline - it is more efficient to process a batch of messages, if they are arriving frequently, than to bear the cost of a separate transaction for every message. Spring Batch provides an AOP interceptor that wraps a method call in a RepeatOperations for just this purpose. The RepeatOperationsInterceptor executes the intercepted method and repeats according to the CompletionPolicy in the provided RepeatTemplate.

Here is an example of declarative iteration using the Spring AOP namespace to repeat a service call to a method called processMessage (for more detail on how to configure AOP interceptors see the Spring User Guide):

<aop:config>
    <aop:pointcut id="transactional"
        expression="execution(* com..*Service.processMessage(..))" />
    <aop:advisor pointcut-ref="transactional"
        advice-ref="retryAdvice" order="-1"/>
</aop:config>

<bean id="retryAdvice" class="org.spr...RepeatOperationsInterceptor"/>

The example above uses a default RepeatTemplate inside the interceptor. To change the policies, listeners etc. you only need to inject an instance of RepeatTemplate into the interceptor.

If the intercepted method returns void then the interceptor always returns ExitStatus.CONTINUABLE (so there is a danger of an infinite loop if the CompletionPolicy does not have a finite end point). Otherwise it returns ExitStatus.CONTINUABLE until the return value from the intercepted method is null, at which point it returns ExitStatus.FINISHED. So the business logic inside the target method can signal that there is no more work to do by returning null, or by throwing an exception that is re-thrown by the ExceptionHandler in the provided RepeatTemplate.