Add listener attribute to @Retryable

[muchiri08]

Currently, implementing a RetryListener requires manually configuring a RetryTemplate. This forces developers to abandon the declarative @Retryable annotation and write programmatic boilerplate code to handle retry lifecycle events (logging, metrics, etc.), which was previously easier to manage via @Recover.

Add a listener attribute to the @Retryable annotation to allow declarative registration of a RetryListener bean.

@Retryable(listener = MyListener.class)
public void execute() {}

@Component // optional maybe?
class MyListener implements RetryListener{}

[ivamly]

Hi team, I'd be glad to contribute a PR for this if the maintainers approve it.

[sbrannen]

Hi @muchiri08,

Congratulations on creating your first issue for the Spring Framework! 👍

We actually considered this approach (a listener attribute registering a RetryListener) while working through #35382 (see also #35685), but RetryListener is tied to RetryTemplate implementation details (RetryPolicy, RetryException, etc.) and doesn't map cleanly to @Retryable's reactive retry path (which is based on Project Reactor).

Instead, we introduced MethodRetryEvent in 7.0.3, which is published via the standard ApplicationEventPublisher for every retry attempt/exhaustion on both blocking and reactive retries. You can listen for those events with ApplicationListener<MethodRetryEvent> or @EventListener(MethodRetryEvent.class).

That should hopefully cover the logging/metrics use case here without adding a custom listener attribute.

I am therefore closing this as a duplicate of #35382. However, feel free to reopen this issue with further details if MethodRetryEvent doesn't cover your scenario.

Cheers,

Sam