Create PDF and send mail through apache camel

Question

We have the following scenario:

• Customer sends a XML message containing two parts
• First part of the XML contains information that should be used for the creation of the PDF using the fop component and XSLT
• Second part of the XML contains information which used in the mail body, subject, etc.

In the camel configuration:

• The incoming XML could be transformed to XSL:FO (using XSLT)
• The fop component can be called and than a PDF document is available
• The mail component can be called but than i have the following problems
  • The original message containing the information for the mail is no longer available. One possibility is store the original body within a header or property
  • The PDF should be added as attachment. I think there is no default processor, filter, etc available to move the body to a attachment. So i have to write my own processor

Questions

• Has anyone a example camel configuration for a similar use case?
• May be a Splitter pattern does the trick but the current example have multiple orders in the XML file and our XML file contains no multiple items but contains some data. Is there another pattern that will work in this use case?

Any suggestions would be very help full.

I tried it with the below camel configuration but within the merge strategy the zip is never present. It looks like there is no response from the createZip route

        <camel:multicast strategyRef="mergeStrategy">
            <camel:to uri="direct:createZip"/>
            <camel:to uri="direct:createRequestMessage"/>
        </camel:multicast>

        <camel:to uri="smtp://server?to=michel@mail-pd.beinformed.com"></camel:to>
    </camel:route>

    <camel:route>
        <camel:from uri="direct:createZip" />
        <camel:from uri="file:////data/tmp/zip/input">
            <camel:description>Reading files from the input folder</camel:description>
        </camel:from>

        <camel:aggregate strategyRef="zipStrategy" eagerCheckCompletion="true" completionFromBatchConsumer="true">
            <camel:correlationExpression>
                <camel:constant>true</camel:constant>
            </camel:correlationExpression>

            <camel:setHeader headerName="dummybody">
                <camel:simple>${body}</camel:simple>
            </camel:setHeader>
        </camel:aggregate>

        <camel:setHeader headerName="Strategy-Attachment">
            <camel:constant>true</camel:constant>
        </camel:setHeader>

    </camel:route>


    <camel:route>
        <camel:from uri="direct:createRequestMessage" />
        <camel:to uri="create_request.xslt?saxon=true" />
        <camel:setHeader headerName="Content-Type">
            <camel:constant>text/html</camel:constant>
        </camel:setHeader>
        <camel:setHeader headerName="Strategy-Body">
            <camel:constant>true</camel:constant>
        </camel:setHeader>
    </camel:route>

Answer 1

Your route with direct:createZip is wrong, you cannot really have 2 x from in the same route. Instead what you should do is to use the Content Enricher EIP pattern: http://camel.apache.org/content-enricher.html

There is a <pollEnrich> you can use to consume the file. Mind about what to do if there is no file, then you need to set a timeout. So read the documentation about this.