Tutorial-Example-ReportIncident-Part5

Part 5

We continue from part 4 where we have the routing in place. However as you might have noticed we aren't quiet there yet with a nice solution, we are still coding to much. In this part we will look into to address these two concerns:

Staring Camel automatically
Using CXF in routing

Starting Camel automatically

Our current deployment model is as a war and we have the web.xml to help start things. Well in fact we will leverage Spring to start the world . We use it's ContextListener

	<!-- the listener that kick-starts Spring -->
	<listener>
		<listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
	</listener>

Then we need a standard Spring XML file so we create a new file in src/main/resources and name it camel-config.xml. Before we start editing this XML file we need to link to it from the web.xml file. So we add this snippet to the web.xml:

	<!-- location of spring xml files -->
	<context-param>
	    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
            <param-value>classpath:camel-config.xml</param-value>
	</context-param>

Now we are ready to edit the camel-config.xml file that is a standard Spring XML bean file. So you can add standard spring beans and whatnot you like to do and can do with Spring.

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

</beans>

Now we are nearly there, we just need to add Camel to the Spring XML file, so Spring knows Camel exists and can start it. First we need to add Camel to the schema location in the top of the XML file.

       ...
       xsi:schemaLocation="
            http://activemq.apache.org/camel/schema/spring http://activemq.apache.org/camel/schema/spring/camel-spring.xsd
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">

Now we are ready to let Spring and Camel work together. What we need to do is adding a CamelContext to the Spring XML file. Camel ships with a CamelContextFactoryBean that is a Spring factory bean we should use for creating and initializing the SpringCamelContext. SpringCamelContext is extending CamelContext to be Spring aware so Camel and Spring can work nicely together. For instance the Registry will now use Spring bean lookup. So any spring bean can now easily be lookup and used from Camel. Well back to today's lesson. So we can create a SpringCamelContext using the factory bean as illustrated below:

   <bean id="camel" class="org.apache.camel.spring.CamelContextFactoryBean"/>

However this is not used very often as Spring has support for custom namespace, so Camel has a CamelNamespaceHandler so we can create Camel using nice XML syntax as:

    <camelContext id="camel" xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/camel/schema/spring">
       ...
    </camelContext>

Adding route builder

Now we have Camel integrated but we still need to add our route bulder that we did manually from the javacode as:

    // append the routes to the context
    context.addRoutes(new ReportIncidentRoutes());

There are two solutions to this

using spring bean
package scanning

Using a spring bean we just declare the route builder using a regular spring bean:

   <bean id="myrouter" class="org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.ReportIncidentRoutes"/>

And then we can refer to it from our CamelContext:

    <camelContext id="camel" xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/camel/schema/spring">
       <routeBuilderRef ref="myrouter"/>
    </camelContext>

So now when Spring start's it will read the camel-context.xml file and thus also start Camel as well. As SpringCamelContext is spring lifecycle event aware, Camel will also shutdown when Spring is shutting down. So when you stop the web application Spring will notify this and Camel is also shutdown nice and properly. So as an end user no need to worry.

The package scanning solution is for convenience to refer to a java package and Camel will scan all classes within this package for RouteBuilder classes. If using this then you dont need to declare your route builder as a Spring bean. So the XML can be reduced to.

    <camelContext id="camel" xmlns="http://activemq.apache.org/camel/schema/spring">
       <package>org.apache.camel.example.reportincident</package>
    </camelContext>

Using CXF directly

Now we have seen how you can leverage Spring to start Camel, in fact it handles the lifecycle of Camel, so you can say Camel is embedded with Spring in your application.

From the very start of this tutorial we have used CXF as the webservice framework and we haven't integrated it directly with Camel as it can do out-of-the-box. Camel ships with a camel-cxf component for integrating CXF directly within Camel routing. In our tutorial we are exposing a webservice so we want continue to do this. Before we continue let's recap at what the webservice implementation we have from part 4

/**
 * The webservice we have implemented.
 */
public class ReportIncidentEndpointImpl implements ReportIncidentEndpoint {

    private CamelContext context;

    public ReportIncidentEndpointImpl() throws Exception {
        // create the context
        context = new DefaultCamelContext();

        // append the routes to the context
        context.addRoutes(new ReportIncidentRoutes());

        // at the end start the camel context
        context.start();
    }

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) {
        // create the producer template to use for sending messages
        ProducerTemplate producer = context.createProducerTemplate();
        // send the body and the filename defined with the special header key
        Object mailBody = producer.sendBody("direct:start", parameters);
        System.out.println("Body:" + mailBody);

        // return an OK reply
        OutputReportIncident out = new OutputReportIncident();
        out.setCode("OK");
        return out;
    }

}

We have already seen how we can get Spring starting Camel so the constructor method can be removed. What next is that the CamelContext needed in this code should be the one from our camel-context.xml file. So we change the code to use a plain setter injection (we can use Spring annotations and whatelse but we keep it simple with a setter):

/**
 * The webservice we have implemented.
 */
public class ReportIncidentEndpointImpl implements ReportIncidentEndpoint {

    private CamelContext context;

    public void setCamelContext(CamelContext context) {
        this.context = context;
    }

    public OutputReportIncident reportIncident(InputReportIncident parameters) {
        // create the producer template to use for sending messages
        ProducerTemplate producer = context.createProducerTemplate();
        // send the body and the filename defined with the special header key
        Object mailBody = producer.sendBody("direct:start", parameters);
        System.out.println("Body:" + mailBody);

        // return an OK reply
        OutputReportIncident out = new OutputReportIncident();
        out.setCode("OK");
        return out;
    }

}

And then we need to instruct Spring to set this property. Turning back to cxf-config.xml from part 4 we can add a reference to our camel context

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xmlns:jaxws="http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws"
       xsi:schemaLocation="
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd
            http://cxf.apache.org/jaxws http://cxf.apache.org/schemas/jaxws.xsd">

    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf.xml"/>
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-extension-soap.xml"/>
    <import resource="classpath:META-INF/cxf/cxf-servlet.xml"/>

    <!-- implementation of the webservice, and we refer to our camel context with the id = camel from camel-context.xml -->
    <bean id="reportIncidentEndpoint" class="org.apache.camel.example.reportincident.ReportIncidentEndpointImpl">
       <property name="context" ref="camel"/>
    </bean>

    <!-- export the webservice using jaxws -->
    <jaxws:endpoint id="reportIncident"
                    implementor="#reportIncidentEndpoint"
                    address="/incident"
                    wsdlLocation="/WEB-INF/wsdl/report_incident.xml"
                    endpointName="s:ReportIncidentPort"
                    serviceName="s:ReportIncidentService"
                    xmlns:s="http://reportincident.example.camel.apache.org"/>
</beans>

So now we have two spring XML files
- cxf-config.xml
- camel-config.xml

And since cxf-config.xml is dependent on camel-config.xml we need to have correct ordering in our web.xml where we have defined the XML files to load by Spring. So we set the camel-config.xml before the cxf-config.xml so Spring have created the SpringCamelContext and registered it in its registry with the id = camel.
{code:xml}
	<!-- location of spring xml files -->
	<context-param>
		<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>classpath:camel-config.xml</param-value>
        <param-value>classpath:cxf-config.xml</param-value>
	</context-param>

Child pages

Tutorial-Example-ReportIncident-Part5

Part 5

Starting Camel automatically

Adding route builder

Using CXF directly