Gunnar, feel free to assign to Oleg if that makes more sense. Sounds like this one might be resolved already via other issues.

It should be possible to use a filename expression where the base path is static but the dynamic part is appended to it.

We might want to consider a NEW issue that makes it possible to have the filename expression considered as a relative path (when not starting with a slash, for example), but as long as the above workaround is feasible, we could defer that new feature until 2.2.0.

This will fail:

    <int-file:outbound-channel-adapter  auto-create-directory="true" channel="outputChannel" directory="target/out" filename-generator-expression="'/bb/file.txt'" temporary-file-suffix=".writing"/>

Directory 'bb' does not exist and 'auto-create-directory' only applies to the 'directory' attribute which is created at initialization.

Gunnar

Could you please attach a test or link to the github that reproduces it. Best is to create a branch for this issue with failing tests and push it so we can look at see what's going on.

I had to do something similar and wrote a FileNameGenerator instance that wraps around another FileNameGenerator (see attached file). I then created a bean instance with the root directory assigned as a constructor-arg and assigned the bean as the filename-generator attribute.

Created 2 cases illustrating the issue. One test-case succeeds and one test case fails:

https://github.com/ghillert/spring-integration/commit/ab425b1cf23c6a506df9e3225158241e037f204c

<outbound-channel-adapter id="save-to-base-directory"
		channel="inputChannelSaveToBaseDir"
        auto-create-directory="true"
        filename-generator-expression="'foo.txt'"
		directory="target/base-directory" />

<outbound-channel-adapter id="save-to-sub-directory"
		channel="inputChannelSaveToSubDir"
        auto-create-directory="true"
        filename-generator-expression="'/sub-directory/foo.txt'"
		directory="target/base-directory" />

Workaround:

Depending on your use-case, you can use a custom implementation of the FileNameGenerator interface. The following custom FileNameGenerator is references by the File Outbound Channel Adapter and uses a base directory and retrieves the sub-directory from the Message Header. The outbound-channel-adapter's directory attribute is mandatory and is set to equal the MyFilenameGenerator's baseDirectory property.

public class MyFilenameGenerator implements FileNameGenerator {
	
  private String baseDirectory = "";
	
  public String generateFileName(Message<?> message) {

    File directory = (File) message.getHeaders().get("directory");	
    new File(new File(baseDirectory), directory.getPath()).mkdirs();	
    return directory.getPath() + "/" + message.getHeaders().get(FileHeaders.FILENAME);
	
  }
	
  public void setBaseDirectory(String baseDirectory) {
    Assert.notNull(baseDirectory);
    this.baseDirectory = baseDirectory;

  }	
}

Issued Pull Request:

https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-integration/pull/494

Added directory-expression attribute for File Outbound Channel Adapter and File Outbound Gateway