NullpointerException: Intermittent Exception in Smooks 1.4

Looks like you're calling close on the Smooks instance and then reusing it. Or you may just have a race condition with one thread closing the Smooks instance while another is still using it. Basically... check your code for where you're calling Smooks.close().

The reason we faced this issue is , smooks.close() does not do a full cleanup and for a long time smooks is able to continue functioning without erroring out post a call to close(). The thing that exposed this bug is a bad first record immeditaly after server startup, that we sent in for a negative test case that failed during a timestamp decoding. That leaves smooks not fully initialized in certain respects as regards the static configuration itself - like the objects in AbstractDeliveryConfig.objectsTable. It seems that the Null checks around BeanInstancePopulator.getDecoder() leading upto AbstractDeliveryConfig.getObjects() ensure that configuration artifacts continue to be alive and kicking even after smooks.close().

smooks.close() should be a hard close() with all configuration wiped out to ensure smooks does not function past that method call.

So guys, can you clarify... is your code calling Smooks.close() and then making subsequent calls to Smooks.filterSource (Yes/No)?

We should certainly add a check in the Smooks.filterSource() method to check that the instance has not already been closed. This however would not solve the situation where multiple threads are concurrently executing filtering ops on a single Smooks instance and one of those threads closes the smooks instance while the others are still processing. This needs to be managed by your containing app.

Yes.The case where we got the exception.