Spring Batch : Execution order for multiple JobExecutionListener instances for a single job

Question

Given a Spring Batch job that has a list of JobExecutionListener instances configured for it, what is the execution order for each of the listeners. Example :

<job id="myJob" xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/batch">

        <batch:listeners>
            <batch:listener ref="myJobExecutionListener1" />
            <batch:listener ref="myJobExecutionListener2" />
            <batch:listener ref="myJobExecutionListener3" />
            <batch:listener ref="myJobExecutionListener4" />                
        </batch:listeners>

       <!-- job config continues -->
</job>

In the above example, is there a guarentee that the listeners will be executed in the order of configuraiton or will the listeners be executed in a random order. I tried looking through the Spring Batch reference documentation but I could not find this documented as far as my research goes.

Answer 1

Listeners will be executed in their declaration order. In your example, they will be called in the following sequence:

myJobExecutionListener1.beforeJob
myJobExecutionListener2.beforeJob
myJobExecutionListener3.beforeJob
myJobExecutionListener4.beforeJob

// .. job output

myJobExecutionListener4.afterJob
myJobExecutionListener3.afterJob
myJobExecutionListener2.afterJob
myJobExecutionListener1.afterJob