Spring Integration Gateway with no arguments

Question

On my gateway, I have a method

@Gateway
String commsTest();

The idea is that I can call commsTest from the bean and use spring integration to wire it up to the service activator that will check comms.

When I do that I get a receive is not supported, because no pollable reply channel has been configured error. I realise that this is because a method with no params means "I am trying to poll a message from the channel"

This is a two part question.

1. What does it mean to poll a message from the channel.
2. How can I get the functionality I want.

Answer 1

Spring Integration currently has no concept of a message without a payload. By default, a gateway method with no arguments implies you want to receive data (rather than sending data or sending and receiving data).

You can change that default behavior, as described in the reference documentation.