Controlling Routes in Camel

I have had the need to be able to control routes from different routes quite a number of times (both in Mule and Camel). Typically this is useful if you would like to be able to remotely control your routes using any of the available transports. Yes, some might say that you have JMX available to do this and even if your administrators do not want to open up any new ports on the test environment you can always overload a port already being used by the ESB and proxy for example the MX4J interface, however that is a different story.

But why not control your routes using the same way as you interact with your application. If you are sending JMS messages to your application, why not have a queue which receives control messages. Or if you are using web services, why not expose a web service which will allow you to control the routes. This is one beauty of an ESB, you have so much flexibility when it comes to transports to use.

So what I did for camel was create a simple bean, which will perform the control action (START, STOP, RESUME, SUSPEND) on a specific route depending on the Route Id.


The bean has two attributes, routeId and action which can be set to give the bean a default value and a method which takes an Exchange as parameter which is the entry point. From the exchange we attempt to get headers "IntegrationCocktail.RouteController.RouteId" and "IntegrationCocktail.RouteController.Action". If these headers are not set, we use the defaults set directly on the bean. Finally, depending on the action we simply call context.startRoute/stopRoute/resumeRoute/suspendRoute(routeId).

To use this bean, you can choose to either give it static behaviour by setting the attributes on the bean, or dynamically by setting the appropriate message headers. The source code is availale on the integration-cocktail github repository and I created a camel-tools project where I will be putting such tit bits. For examples for how to use this bean you can look at the tests.

Finally, a question that inquisitive readers might ask is, will it be possible to stop or suspend the current route? Can you use this bean to for example stop the current route when an exception is thrown? Technically, it will work but not elegantly since by default the DefaultShutdownStrategy kicks in to enforce a graceful shutdown which will wait for all in flight exchanges to finish. However, the current exchange which initiated the stop request is still in flight so you will end up waiting until the timeout. We will polish the behaviour of the RouteController for such situations in another post.

Until then, feel free to to suggest other possible ”tools” for both Camel and Mule either by commenting on the post or at integrationcocktail@google.com.