Intercept

The intercept feature in Camel supports intercepting Exchange's' while they are being routed.

Kinds of interceptors

Camel supports three kinds of interceptors:

The interceptSendToEndpoint is dynamic hence it will also trigger if a dynamic URI is constructed that Camel was not aware of at startup time.

The interceptFrom is not dynamic, and will only intercept all the known routes when Camel is starting. So if you construct a Consumer using the Camel Java API and consumes messages from this endpoint, then the interceptFrom is not triggered.

Interceptor scopes

All the interceptors can be configured on global, or with Route Configuration.

Common features of the interceptors

All these interceptors support the following features:

  • Predicate using when to only trigger the interceptor in certain conditions

  • stop forces stopping continue routing the Exchange and mark it as completed successful (it’s actually the Stop EIP).

  • skip when used with interceptSendToEndpoint will skip sending the message to the original intended endpoint.

  • afterUri when used with interceptSendToEndpoint allows to send the message to an endpoint afterward.

  • interceptFrom and interceptSendToEndpoint support endpoint URI pattern matching by exact uri, wildcard and regular expression. See further below for more details.

  • The intercepted endpoint uri is stored as exchange property with the key Exchange.INTERCEPTED_ENDPOINT.

Using intercept

The Intercept is intercepting the Exchange on every processing step during routing.

Given the following example:

  • Java

  • XML

// global interceptor for all routes
intercept().to("log:hello");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder");
<camelContext>

  <!-- global interceptor for all routes -->
  <intercept>
    <to uri="log:hello"/>
  </intercept>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

What happens is that the Exchange is intercepted before each processing step, that means that it will be intercepted before

  • .to("bean:validateOrder")

  • .to("bean:processOrder")

So in this example we intercept the Exchange twice.

Controlling when to intercept using a predicate

If you only want to intercept "sometimes", then you can use a predicate.

For instance, in the sample below, we only intercept if the message body contains the string word Hello:

  • Java

  • XML

intercept().when(body().contains("Hello")).to("mock:intercepted");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder");
<camelContext>

  <intercept>
      <when>
          <simple>${in.body} contains 'Hello'</simple>
      </when>
      <to uri="mock:intercepted"/>
  </intercept>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

Stop routing after being intercepted

It is also possible to stop routing after being intercepted. Now suppose that if the message body contains the word Hello we want to log and stop, then we can do:

  • Java

  • XML

intercept().when(body().contains("Hello"))
  .to("log:test")
  .stop(); // stop continue routing

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder");
<camelContext>

  <intercept>
      <when>
        <simple>${body} contains 'Hello'</simple>
        <to uri="log:test"/>
        <stop/> <!-- stop continue routing -->
      </when>
  </intercept>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

Using interceptFrom

The interceptFrom is for intercepting any incoming Exchange, in any route (it intercepts all the from EIPs)

This allows you to do some custom behavior for received Exchanges. You can provide a specific uri for a given Endpoint then it only applies for that particular route.

So let’s start with the logging example. We want to log all the incoming messages, so we use interceptFrom to route to the Log component.

  • Java

  • XML

interceptFrom()
  .to("log:incoming");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder");
<camelContext>

  <intercept>
    <to uri="log:incoming"/>
  </intercept>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

If you want to only apply a specific endpoint, such as all jms endpoints, you can do:

  • Java

  • XML

interceptFrom("jms*")
  .to("log:incoming");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder");

from("file:inbox")
  .to("ftp:someserver/backup")
<camelContext>

  <interceptFrom uri="jms*">
    <to uri="log:incoming"/>
  </intercept>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
  </route>
  <route>
    <from uri="file:inbox"/>
    <to uri="ftp:someserver/backup"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

In this example then only messages from the JMS route are intercepted, because we specified a pattern in the interceptFrom as jms* (uses a wildcard).

The pattern syntax is documented in more details later.

Using interceptSendToEndpoint

You can also intercept when Apache Camel is sending a message to an endpoint.

This can be used to do some custom processing before the message is sent to the intended destination.

The interceptor can also be configured to not send to the destination (skip) which means the message is detoured instead.

A Predicate can also be used to control when to intercept, which has been previously covered.

The afterUri option, is used when you need to process the response message from the intended destination. This functionality was added later to the interceptor, in a way of sending to yet another endpoint.

Let’s start with a basic example, where we want to intercept when a message is being sent to kafka:

  • Java

  • XML

interceptSendToEndpoint("kafka*")
  .to("bean:beforeKafka");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder")
  .to("kafka:order");
<camelContext>

  <interceptSendToEndpoint uri="kafka*">
    <to uri="bean:beforeKafka"/>
  </interceptSendToEndpoint>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
    <to uri="kafka:order"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

When you also want to process the message after it has been sent to the intended destination, then the example is slightly odd because you have to use the afterUri as shown:

  • Java

  • XML

interceptSendToEndpoint("kafka*")
  .to("bean:beforeKafka")
  .afterUri("bean:afterKafka");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder")
  .to("kafka:order");
<camelContext>

  <interceptSendToEndpoint uri="kafka*" afterUri="bean:afterKafka">
    <to uri="bean:beforeKafka"/>
  </interceptSendToEndpoint>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
    <to uri="kafka:order"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

Skip sending to original endpoint

Sometimes you want to intercept and skip sending messages to a specific endpoint.

For example, to avoid sending any message to kafka, but detour them to a mock endpoint, it can be done as follows:

  • Java

  • XML

interceptSendToEndpoint("kafka*").skipSendToOriginalEndpoint()
  .to("mock:kafka");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder")
  .to("kafka:order");
<camelContext>

  <interceptSendToEndpoint uri="kafka*" skipSendToOriginalEndpoint="true">
    <to uri="mock:kafka"/>
  </interceptSendToEndpoint>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
    <to uri="kafka:order"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

Conditional skipping sending to endpoint

You can combine both a predicate and skip sending to the original endpoint. For example, suppose you have some "test" messages that sometimes occur, and that you want to avoid sending these messages to a downstream kafka system, then this can be done as shown:

  • Java

  • XML

interceptSendToEndpoint("kafka*").skipSendToOriginalEndpoint()
  .when(simple("${header.biztype} == 'TEST'")
  .log("TEST message detected - is NOT send to kafka");

from("jms:queue:order")
  .to("bean:validateOrder")
  .to("bean:processOrder")
  .to("kafka:order");
<camelContext>

  <interceptSendToEndpoint uri="kafka*" skipSendToOriginalEndpoint="true">
    <when><simple>${header.biztype} == 'TEST'</simple></when>
    <log message="TEST message detected - is NOT send to kafka"/>
  </interceptSendToEndpoint>

  <route>
    <from uri="jms:queue:order"/>
    <to uri="bean:validateOrder"/>
    <to uri="bean:processOrder"/>
    <to uri="kafka:order"/>
  </route>

</camelContext>

Intercepting endpoints using pattern matching

The interceptFrom and interceptSendToEndpoint support endpoint pattern matching by the following rules in the given order:

  • match by exact URI name

  • match by wildcard

  • match by regular expression

Intercepting when matching by exact URI

This matches only a specific endpoint with exactly the same URI.

For example, to intercept messages being sent to a specific JMS queue, you can do:

interceptSendToEndpoint("jms:queue:cheese").to("log:smelly");

Intercepting when matching endpoints by wildcard

Match by wildcard allows you to match a range of endpoints or all of a given type. For instance use file:* will match all file-based endpoints.

interceptFrom("file:*").to("log:from-file");

Match by wildcard works so that the pattern ends with a \* and that the uri matches if it starts with the same pattern.

For example, you can be more specific, to only match for files from specific folders like:

interceptFrom("file:order/inbox/*").to("log:new-file-orders");

Intercepting when matching endpoints by regular expression

Match by regular expression is just like match by wildcard but using regex instead. So if we want to intercept incoming messages from gold and silver JMS queues, we can do:

interceptFrom("jms:queue:(gold|silver)").to("seda:handleFast");
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