Chapter 39. Payload-Based Route

Select the PAYLOAD format, if you want to access the SOAP message body in XML format, encoded as a DOM object (that is, of org.w3c.dom.Node type). One of the advantages of the PAYLOAD format is that no JAX-WS and JAXB stub code is required, which allows your application to be dynamic, potentially handling many different WSDL interfaces.

Having a message body in XML format enables you to parse the request using XML languages such as XPath and to generate responses using templating languages, such as Velocity.

The code presented in this chapter is taken from the following demonstration:

cxf-webinars-jboss-fuse-6.3/customer-ws-camel-cxf-payload

cxf-webinars-jboss-fuse-6.3/customer-ws-camel-cxf-payload

For details of how to download and install the demonstration code, see Chapter 34, Demonstration Code for Camel/CXF

The Camel CXF component is an Apache CXF component that integrates Web services with routes. You can use it either to instantiate consumer endpoints (at the start of a route), which behave like Web service instances, or to instantiate producer endpoints (at any other points in the route), which behave like WS clients.

The PAYLOAD data format is selected by setting the dataFormat=PAYLOAD option on a Camel CXF endpoint URI and it has the following characteristics:

To implement and build the demonstration PAYLOAD-based route, starting from scratch, you would perform the following steps:

Figure 39.1, “Sample PAYLOAD Route” shows an outline of the route that is used to process the operations of the CustomerService Web service using the PAYLOAD data format. After sorting the request messages by operation name, an operation-specific processor bean reads the incoming request parameters. Finally, the response messages are generated using Velocity templates.