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Background and Introduction

So there's a company, which we'll call Acme. Acme sells widgets, in a fairly unusual way. Their customers have stock rooms with tons of Acme widgets, owned by Acme. When the customer requires a widget, they take it out of the stock room. Then they enter into their own systems (ERP or whatever) that they bought the widget. Then at some point, their systems emit a record of the sale which needs to go to Acme so Acme can bill them for it. Obviously, everyone wants this to be as automated as possible, so there needs to be integration between the customer's system and Acme.

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This tutorial will cover all that, plus setting up tests along the way.

High-Level Diagram

Here's more or less what the integration process looks like.

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And then, the output from Acme to the customers:

Tutorial Tasks

Here's what we'll try to accomplish in this tutorial:

1. Get sample files for the customer Excel, CSV, and XML input
2. Get a sample file for the canonical XML format that Acme's accounting system uses
3. Create an XSD for the canonical XML format
4. Create JAXB POJOs corresponding to the canonical XSD
5. Create an XSLT stylesheet to convert the Customer 1 (XML over FTP) messages to the canonical format
6. Create a unit test to ensure that a simple Camel route invoking the XSLT stylesheet works
7. Create a POJO that converts a List<List<String>> to the above JAXB POJOs
   • Note that Camel can automatically convert CSV input to a List of Lists of Strings representing the rows and columns of the CSV, so we'll use this POJO to handle Customer 2 (CSV over HTTP)
8. Create a unit test to ensure that a simple Camel route invoking the CSV processing works
9. Create a POJO that converts a Customer 3 Excel file to the above JAXB POJOs (using POI to read Excel)
10. Create a unit test to ensure that a simple Camel route invoking the Excel processing works
11. Create a POJO that reads an input message, takes an attachment off the message, and replaces the body of the message with the attachment
    • This is assuming for Customer 3 (Excel over e-mail) that the e-mail contains a single Excel file as an attachment, and the actual e-mail body is throwaway
12. Build a set of Camel routes to handle the entire input (Customer -> Acme) side of the scenario.
13. Build unit tests for the Camel input.
14. TODO: Tasks for the output (Acme -> Customer) side of the scenario

Let's Get Started!