@EventListener annotated bean cannot be removed from the ApplicationEventMulticaster

Affects: 2.4.3

According to the JavaDoc of the ApplicationEventMulticaster I was expecting to be able to remove and/or add ApplicationListeners at runtime.

This currently does not work for @EventListener annotated methods, which apparently lead to a ApplicationListenerMethodAdapter instance at runtime.

Would be great, if we could remove this listener as well, either by

1. making the Adapter instance injectable and then remove it with multicaster.removeApplicationListener(), or
2. giving the Adapter instance a well defined bean name and remove it with multicaster.removeApplicationListenerBean()

I’ve included a small demo app with a failing test to illustrate what I’m trying to achieve:

event-sample.zip

[jhoeller]

I’ve introduced an ApplicationEventMulticaster.removeApplicationListeners(Predicate<ApplicationListener<?>>) method in combination with ApplicationListener.getListenerId(), derived from the optional @EventListener.id attribute and defaulting to the signature of the annotated method. The latter two have been pulled up from TransactionalApplicationListener and @TransactionalEventListener where they had similar semantics already (recently introduced in 5.3, so not widely known).

I hope this works for your use case, e.g.: removeApplicationListeners(l -> l.getListenerId().startsWith("myrootpackage.mymodule"))

[jhoeller]

I’ve revised this a bit to only expose the getListenerId() method on SmartApplicationListener (and also on GenericApplicationListener which derives from it now), avoiding potential conflicts with plain ApplicationListener implementations that happen to implement other interfaces as well (keeping the base interface as minimal as possible).

This means that a downcast will be necessary, I hope that’s still not too bad:

removeApplicationListeners(l -> l instanceof SmartApplicationListener &&
        ((SmartApplicationListener) l).getListenerId().startsWith("myrootpackage.mymodule"))