Bean method

Since Camel 1.3

The purpose of the Bean Language is to be able to implement an Expression or Predicate using a simple method on a bean.

So the idea is you specify a bean name which will then be resolved in the Registry such as the Spring ApplicationContext then a method is invoked to evaluate the Expression or Predicate.

If no method name is provided then one is attempted to be chosen using the rules for Bean Binding; using the type of the message body and using any annotations on the bean methods.

The Bean Binding rules are used to bind the Message Exchange to the method parameters; so you can annotate the bean to extract headers or other expressions such as XPath or XQuery from the message.

Bean Options

The Bean method language supports 5 options, which are listed below.

Name Default Java Type Description

bean

String

Deprecated Either a reference or a class name of the bean to use

ref

String

Reference to bean to lookup in the registry

method

String

Name of method to call

beanType

String

Class name of the bean to use

trim

true

Boolean

Whether to trim the value to remove leading and trailing whitespaces and line breaks

Using Bean Expressions from the Java DSL

from("activemq:topic:OrdersTopic").
  filter().method("myBean", "isGoldCustomer").
    to("activemq:BigSpendersQueue");

Using Bean Expressions from XML

<route>
  <from uri="activemq:topic:OrdersTopic"/>
  <filter>
    <method ref="myBean" method="isGoldCustomer"/>
    <to uri="activemq:BigSpendersQueue"/>
  </filter>
</route>
Bean attribute is now deprecated. The bean attribute of the method expression element is now deprecated. You should now make use of ref attribute instead.

Writing the expression bean

The bean in the above examples is just any old Java Bean with a method called isGoldCustomer() that returns some object that is easily converted to a boolean value in this case, as its used as a predicate.

So we could implement it like this…​

public class MyBean {
  public boolean isGoldCustomer(Exchange exchange) {
    ...
  }
}

We can also use the Bean Integration annotations. For example you could do…​

public boolean isGoldCustomer(String body) {
  // do something
}

or

public boolean isGoldCustomer(@Header(name = "foo") Integer fooHeader) {
  // do something
}

So you can bind parameters of the method to the Exchange, the Message or individual headers, properties, the body or other expressions.

Non registry beans

The Bean Language also supports invoking beans that isn’t registered in the Registry. This is usable for quickly to invoke a bean from Java DSL where you don’t need to register the bean in the Registry such as the Spring ApplicationContext.

Camel can instantiate the bean and invoke the method if given a class or invoke an already existing instance. This is illustrated from the example below:

from("activemq:topic:OrdersTopic").
        filter().expression(BeanLanguage(MyBean.class, "isGoldCustomer")).
        to("activemq:BigSpendersQueue");

The 2nd parameter isGoldCustomer is an optional parameter to explicit set the method name to invoke. If not provided Camel will try to invoke the best suited method. If case of ambiguity Camel will thrown an Exception. In these situations the 2nd parameter can solve this problem. Also the code is more readable if the method name is provided. The 1st parameter can also be an existing instance of a Bean such as:

private MyBean my;

    from("activemq:topic:OrdersTopic").
        filter().expression(BeanLanguage.bean(my, "isGoldCustomer")).
            to("activemq:BigSpendersQueue");

In Camel 2.2 onwards you can avoid the BeanLanguage and have it just as:

private MyBean my;

    from("activemq:topic:OrdersTopic").
        filter().expression(bean(my, "isGoldCustomer")).
            to("activemq:BigSpendersQueue");

Which also can be done in a bit shorter and nice way:

private MyBean my;

    from("activemq:topic:OrdersTopic").
        filter().method(my, "isGoldCustomer").
            to("activemq:BigSpendersQueue");

Dependencies

The Bean language is part of camel-core.

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