PDF

Since Camel 2.16

Only producer is supported

The PDF component provides the ability to create, modify or extract content from PDF documents. This component uses Apache PDFBox as the underlying library to work with PDF documents.

To use the PDF component, Maven users will need to add the following dependency to their pom.xml:

pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.camel</groupId>
    <artifactId>camel-pdf</artifactId>
    <version>x.x.x</version>
    <!-- use the same version as your Camel core version -->
</dependency>

URI format

The PDF component only supports producer endpoints.

pdf:operation[?options]

Configuring Options

Camel components are configured on two separate levels:

  • component level

  • endpoint level

Configuring Component Options

At the component level, you set general and shared configurations that are, then, inherited by the endpoints. It is the highest configuration level.

For example, a component may have security settings, credentials for authentication, urls for network connection and so forth.

Some components only have a few options, and others may have many. Because components typically have pre-configured defaults that are commonly used, then you may often only need to configure a few options on a component; or none at all.

You can configure components using:

  • the Component DSL.

  • in a configuration file (application.properties, *.yaml files, etc).

  • directly in the Java code.

Configuring Endpoint Options

You usually spend more time setting up endpoints because they have many options. These options help you customize what you want the endpoint to do. The options are also categorized into whether the endpoint is used as a consumer (from), as a producer (to), or both.

Configuring endpoints is most often done directly in the endpoint URI as path and query parameters. You can also use the Endpoint DSL and DataFormat DSL as a type safe way of configuring endpoints and data formats in Java.

A good practice when configuring options is to use Property Placeholders.

Property placeholders provide a few benefits:

  • They help prevent using hardcoded urls, port numbers, sensitive information, and other settings.

  • They allow externalizing the configuration from the code.

  • They help the code to become more flexible and reusable.

The following two sections list all the options, firstly for the component followed by the endpoint.

Component Options

The PDF component supports 2 options, which are listed below.

Name Description Default Type

lazyStartProducer (producer)

Whether the producer should be started lazy (on the first message). By starting lazy you can use this to allow CamelContext and routes to startup in situations where a producer may otherwise fail during starting and cause the route to fail being started. By deferring this startup to be lazy then the startup failure can be handled during routing messages via Camel’s routing error handlers. Beware that when the first message is processed then creating and starting the producer may take a little time and prolong the total processing time of the processing.

false

boolean

autowiredEnabled (advanced)

Whether autowiring is enabled. This is used for automatic autowiring options (the option must be marked as autowired) by looking up in the registry to find if there is a single instance of matching type, which then gets configured on the component. This can be used for automatic configuring JDBC data sources, JMS connection factories, AWS Clients, etc.

true

boolean

Endpoint Options

The PDF endpoint is configured using URI syntax:

pdf:operation

With the following path and query parameters:

Path Parameters (1 parameters)

Name Description Default Type

operation (producer)

Required Operation type.

Enum values:

  • create

  • append

  • extractText

  • merge

PdfOperation

Query Parameters (9 parameters)

Name Description Default Type

font (producer)

Font.

Enum values:

  • COURIER

  • COURIER_BOLD

  • COURIER_OBLIQUE

  • COURIER_BOLD_OBLIQUE

  • HELVETICA

  • HELVETICA_BOLD

  • HELVETICA_OBLIQUE

  • HELVETICA_BOLD_OBLIQUE

  • TIMES_ROMAN

  • TIMES_BOLD

  • TIMES_ITALIC

  • TIMES_BOLD_ITALIC

  • SYMBOL

  • ZAPF_DINGBATS

HELVETICA

String

fontSize (producer)

Font size in pixels.

14

float

marginBottom (producer)

Margin bottom in pixels.

20

int

marginLeft (producer)

Margin left in pixels.

20

int

marginRight (producer)

Margin right in pixels.

40

int

marginTop (producer)

Margin top in pixels.

20

int

pageSize (producer)

Page size.

Enum values:

  • LETTER

  • LEGAL

  • A0

  • A1

  • A2

  • A3

  • A4

  • A5

  • A6

A4

String

textProcessingFactory (producer)

Text processing to use. autoFormatting: Text is getting sliced by words, then max amount of words that fits in the line will be written into pdf document. With this strategy all words that doesn’t fit in the line will be moved to the new line. lineTermination: Builds set of classes for line-termination writing strategy. Text getting sliced by line termination symbol and then it will be written regardless it fits in the line or not.

Enum values:

  • autoFormatting

  • lineTermination

lineTermination

TextProcessingFactory

lazyStartProducer (producer (advanced))

Whether the producer should be started lazy (on the first message). By starting lazy you can use this to allow CamelContext and routes to startup in situations where a producer may otherwise fail during starting and cause the route to fail being started. By deferring this startup to be lazy then the startup failure can be handled during routing messages via Camel’s routing error handlers. Beware that when the first message is processed then creating and starting the producer may take a little time and prolong the total processing time of the processing.

false

boolean

Message Headers

The PDF component supports 4 message header(s), which is/are listed below:

Name Description Default Type

protection-policy (producer)

Constant: PROTECTION_POLICY_HEADER_NAME

ProtectionPolicy

pdf-document (producer)

Constant: PDF_DOCUMENT_HEADER_NAME

Mandatory header for append operation and ignored in all other operations. Expected type is https://pdfbox.apache.org/docs/2.0.13/javadocs/org/apache/pdfbox/pdmodel/PDDocument.htmlPDDocument. Stores PDF document which will be used for append operation.

PDDocument

decryption-material (producer)

Constant: DECRYPTION_MATERIAL_HEADER_NAME

DecryptionMaterial

files-to-merge (producer)

Constant: FILES_TO_MERGE_HEADER_NAME

Mandatory header for merge operation and ignored in all other operations. The array of pdf files that will be merged.

List

Usage

Type converter

Since Camel 4.8, the component is capable of doing simple document conversions. For instance, suppose you are receiving a PDF byte as a byte array:

from("direct:start")
    .to("pdf:extractText")
    .to("mock:result");

It is now possible to get the body as a PD Document by using PDDocument doc = exchange.getIn().getBody(PDDocument.class);, which saves the trouble of converting the byte-array to a document.

this only works for unprotected PDF files. For password-protected, the files still need to be converted manually.

Spring Boot Auto-Configuration

When using pdf with Spring Boot make sure to use the following Maven dependency to have support for auto configuration:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.camel.springboot</groupId>
  <artifactId>camel-pdf-starter</artifactId>
  <version>x.x.x</version>
  <!-- use the same version as your Camel core version -->
</dependency>

The component supports 3 options, which are listed below.

Name Description Default Type

camel.component.pdf.autowired-enabled

Whether autowiring is enabled. This is used for automatic autowiring options (the option must be marked as autowired) by looking up in the registry to find if there is a single instance of matching type, which then gets configured on the component. This can be used for automatic configuring JDBC data sources, JMS connection factories, AWS Clients, etc.

true

Boolean

camel.component.pdf.enabled

Whether to enable auto configuration of the pdf component. This is enabled by default.

Boolean

camel.component.pdf.lazy-start-producer

Whether the producer should be started lazy (on the first message). By starting lazy you can use this to allow CamelContext and routes to startup in situations where a producer may otherwise fail during starting and cause the route to fail being started. By deferring this startup to be lazy then the startup failure can be handled during routing messages via Camel’s routing error handlers. Beware that when the first message is processed then creating and starting the producer may take a little time and prolong the total processing time of the processing.

false

Boolean