5.7. Implementing custom readers

If Spring Batch ItemReader implementations don’t suit your needs, you can provide your own implementations. We don’t describe interacting with the execution context here because it’s covered in chapter 8.

Imagine that you want to handle all files present in a directory at batch startup. The list of files in the directory is loaded when the item reader is instantiated. For each read, you return the first list element after removing it from the list. The following listing shows the implementation of the ListDirectoryItemReader class.