Disable InboundChannelAdapter / Poller with autoStartup false

Question

In Spring Integration, I want to disable a poller by setting the autoStartup=false on the InboundChannelAdapter. But with the following setup, none of my pollers are firing on either my Tomcat instance 1 nor Tomcat instance 2. I have two Tomcat instances with the same code deployed. I want the pollers to be disabled on one of the instances since I do not want the same job polling on the two Tomcat instances concurrently.

Here is the InboundChannelAdapter:

@Bean
@InboundChannelAdapter(value = "irsDataPrepJobInputWeekdayChannel", poller = @Poller(cron="${batch.job.schedule.cron.weekdays.irsDataPrepJobRunner}", maxMessagesPerPoll="1" ), autoStartup = "${batch.job.schedule.cron.weekdays.irsDataPrepJobRunner.autoStartup}")
public MessageSource<JobLaunchRequest> pollIrsDataPrepWeekdayJob() {

    return () -> new GenericMessage<>(requestIrsDataPrepWeekdayJob());
}

The property files are as follows. Property file for Tomcat instance 1:

# I wish for this job to run on Tomcat instance 1
batch.job.schedule.cron.riStateAgencyTransmissionJobRunner=0 50 14 * * *

# since autoStartup defaults to true, I do not provide:
#batch.job.schedule.cron.riStateAgencyTransmissionJobRunner.autoStartup=true

# I do NOT wish for this job to run on Tomcat instance 1
batch.job.schedule.cron.weekdays.irsDataPrepJobRunner.autoStartup=false

# need to supply as poller has a cron placeholder
batch.job.schedule.cron.weekdays.irsDataPrepJobRunner=0 0/7 * * * 1-5

Property file for Tomcat instance 2:

# I wish for this job to run on Tomcat instance 2
batch.job.schedule.cron.weekdays.irsDataPrepJobRunner=0 0/7 * * * 1-5

# since autoStartup defaults to true, I do not provide:
#batch.job.schedule.cron.weekdays.irsDataPrepJobRunner.autoStartup=true

# I do NOT wish for this job to run on Tomcat instance 2
batch.job.schedule.cron.riStateAgencyTransmissionJobRunner.autoStartup=false

# need to supply as poller has a cron placeholder
batch.job.schedule.cron.riStateAgencyTransmissionJobRunner=0 50 14 * * *

The properties files are passed as a VM option, e.g. "-Druntime.scheduler=dev1". I cannot disable the poller on one of the JVMs using "-" as the cron expression -- something similar to the ask here: Poller annotation with cron expression should support a special disable character

My goal of being able to call the job manually from either Tomcat instance 1 or Tomcat instance 2 is working. My problem with the setup mentioned above, is that none of the pollers are firing as per their cron expression.

Answer 1

Consider to investigate a leader election pattern: https://docs.spring.io/spring-integration/docs/current/reference/html/messaging-endpoints.html#leadership-event-handling.

This way you have those endpoints in non-started state by default and in the same role. The election is going to chose a leader and start only this one.

Of course there has to be some shared external service to control leadership.