Bean Component

The bean: component binds beans to Camel message exchanges.

URI format

bean:someName[?methodName=someMethod]

Where someName can be any string which is used to lookup the bean in the Registry and someMethod defines the name of the method to invoke.

This will use the Bean Binding to map the message exchange to the bean.

Using

The object instance that is used to consume messages must be explicitly registered with the Registry. For example if you are using Spring you must define the bean in the spring.xml; or if you don't use Spring then put the bean in JNDI.

// lets populate the context with the services we need
// note that we could just use a spring.xml file to avoid this step
JndiContext context = new JndiContext();
context.bind("bye", new SayService("Good Bye!"));

CamelContext camelContext = new DefaultCamelContext(context);

Once an endpoint has been registered, you can build Camel routes that use it to process exchanges.

// lets add simple route
camelContext.addRoutes(new RouteBuilder() {
    public void configure() {
        from("direct:hello").to("pojo:bye");
    }
});

A bean: endpoint cannot be defined as the input to the route; i.e. you cannot consume from it, you can only route from some inbound message Endpoint to the bean endpoint as output. So consider using a direct: or queue: endpoint as the input.

You can use the createProxy() methods on ProxyHelper to create a proxy that will generate BeanExchanges and send them to any endpoint:

Endpoint endpoint = camelContext.getEndpoint("direct:hello");
ISay proxy = ProxyHelper.createProxy(endpoint, ISay.class);
String rc = proxy.say();
assertEquals("Good Bye!", rc);

Bean binding

The binding of a Camel Message to a bean method call can occur in different ways

  • if the body of the message can be converted to a BeanInvocation (the default payload used by the ProxyHelper) - then that its used to invoke the method and pass the arguments
  • if the message contains the header org.apache.camel.MethodName then that method is invoked, converting the body to whatever the argument is to the method
  • otherwise the type of the method body is used to try find a method which matches; an error is thrown if a single method cannot be chosen unambiguously.

You can also use the @Property and @Header annotations on method parameters to tell Camel which method parameters bind to some header/property value and which parameter binds to the message body. You can use @Body to be precise about which parameter is the body.

For example you could write a method like this

public class Foo {

    @MessageDriven(uri = "activemq:my.queue")
    public void doSomething(String body) {
		// process the inbound message here
    }

}

Here Camel with subscribe to an ActiveMQ queue, then convert the message payload to a String (so dealing with TextMessage, ObjectMessage and BytesMessage in JMS), then process this method.

You could process some headers if you wish like this

public class Foo {
	
    @MessageDriven(uri = "activemq:my.queue")
    public void doSomething(@Header('JMSCorrelationID') String correlationID, @Body String body) {
		// process the inbound message here
    }

}

In the above you can now pass the Message.getJMSCorrelationID() as a parameter to the method (again with possible type conversion too).

Finally you don't need the @MessageDriven annotation; as the Camel route could describe which method to invoke.

e.g. a route could look like

from("activemq:someQueue").
  to("bean:myBean");

Here myBean would be looked up in the Registry (such as JNDI or the Spring ApplicationContext), then the body of the message would be used to try figure out what method to call.

If you want to be explicit you can use

from("activemq:someQueue").
  to("bean:myBean?methodName=doSomething");

See Also

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