Camel Components

ChatScript

Since Camel 3.0

Only producer is supported

The ChatScript component allows you to interact with ChatScript Server and have conversations. This component is stateless and relies on ChatScript to maintain chat history.

Refer to the file ChatScriptMessage.java for details and samples.

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 ChatScript component supports the following 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 ChatScript endpoint is configured using URI syntax:

chatscript:host:port/botName

With the following path and query parameters:

Path Parameters

Name Description Default Type

host (producer)

Required Hostname or IP of the server on which CS server is running.

String

port (producer)

Port on which ChatScript is listening to.

1024

int

botName (producer)

Required Name of the Bot in CS to converse with.

String

Query Parameters

Name Description Default Type

chatUserName (producer)

Username who initializes the CS conversation. To be set when chat is initialized from camel route.

String

resetChat (producer)

Issues :reset command to start a new conversation everytime.

false

boolean

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 Body

The message body at each side of the ChatScript component: Consumer is the body of the messages the consumer creates, Consumer reply the bodies a consumer that answers its caller can reply with, Producer input the bodies the producer can send or write, and Producer output the body after the producer.

Side Body Description

Producer input

pojo or text

A ChatScriptMessage, or its JSON as text with the username and the message fields. Bytes, a stream, a Map or plain text fail; the bot name always comes from the endpoint.

Producer output

pojo (org.apache.camel.component.chatscript.ChatScriptMessage)

The ChatScriptMessage that was sent, with the answer of the bot in its reply (the response field in JSON).

The bodies are the ones with the default options. A side that is not listed is not known, and tooling does not guess it. The carriers are described in the Camel Catalog.

Usage

This component expects a ChatScriptMessage, or its JSON as a String with the following fields:

{
  "username": "name here",
  "botname": "name here",
  "message": "message here"
}

The bot name comes from the endpoint, and the reply is the reply field of the ChatScriptMessage the producer returns (response in its JSON form). The following route sends the message body to the bot Harry as the user in the user header:

- route:
    from:
      uri: direct:chat
      steps:
        - setBody:
            expression:
              simple:
                expression: '{"username": "${header.user}", "message": "${body}"}'
        - to:
            uri: chatscript:localhost:1024/Harry
        - log:
            message: "${body.reply}"