Migrating Filters

Mule 4 does not use filters anymore. The functionality provided by filters in Mule 3 can be achieved by using the Validation Module.

Applying Filters

In Mule 3, when a message was filtered, the flow ended silently at that point.

The Validation module fails the flow when a condition is not met, which makes the migrated flow handle the VALIDATION error.

The flow with the source for sending the response has to account for the VALIDATION error, which you can do by setting a variable in an error handler for validation errors, for example:

Mule 4 example

<flow name="flow">
    ...
    <validation:is-true expression="#[...]"/>
    ...
    <error-handler>
        <on-error-propagate type="MULE:VALIDATION">
            <set-variable variableName="filtered" value="true"/>
        <on-error-propagate/>
    </error-handler/>
</flow>

You can then query the set variable in the source’s error response builder to send an appropriate response to the client. For instance, the http:listener source might be something like this:

Mule 4 example

<flow name="flow">
    <http:listener config-ref="listenerConfig">
        <http:error-response statusCode="#[if (vars.filtered) 400 else 500]"
                             reasonPhrase="#[if (vars.filtered) 'Bad Request' else 'Internal Server Error']">
            <http:body>#[error.description]</http:body>
        </http:error-response>
    </http:listener>
    ...

    <validation:is-true expression="#[...]"/>
    <error-handler>
        <on-error-propagate type="MULE:VALIDATION">
            <set-variable variableName="filtered" value="true"/>
        <on-error-propagate/>
    </error-handler/>
</flow>

In this case, a 400 (Bad Request) code will be returned if the event is filtered.

Migrating Custom or complex Filters

Most likely, any custom or complex/nested filters you used can be migrated to use the expression language. The DataWeave script can be externalized to a file if the same filter needs to be in several places.

For cases where you filter data in ways that DataWeave does not support, you should use the Java module or the Scripting module and use custom code to perform the filtering.

Migrating Filters

Applying Filters

Migrating Custom or complex Filters

See Also