The bean: component binds beans to FUSE Mediation Router message exchanges.

bean:someName[?options]

Where someName can be any string which is used to lookup the bean in the Registry

The object instance that is used to consume messages must be explicitly registered with the Registry. For example if you are using Spring you must define the bean in the spring.xml; or if you don't use Spring then put the bean in JNDI.

// lets populate the context with the services we need
// note that we could just use a spring.xml file to avoid this step
JndiContext context = new JndiContext();
context.bind("bye", new SayService("Good Bye!"));

CamelContext camelContext = new DefaultCamelContext(context);

Once an endpoint has been registered, you can build routes that use it to process exchanges.

// lets add simple route
camelContext.addRoutes(new RouteBuilder() {
    public void configure() {
        from("direct:hello").to("bean:bye");
    }
});

A bean: endpoint cannot be defined as the input to the route; i.e. you cannot consume from it, you can only route from some inbound message Endpoint to the bean endpoint as output. So consider using a direct: or queue: endpoint as the input.

You can use the createProxy() methods on ProxyHelper to create a proxy that will generate BeanExchanges and send them to any endpoint:

Endpoint endpoint = camelContext.getEndpoint("direct:hello");
ISay proxy = ProxyHelper.createProxy(endpoint, ISay.class);
String rc = proxy.say();
assertEquals("Good Bye!", rc);

And the same route using Spring DSL:

    <route>
       <from uri="direct:hello">
       <to uri="bean:bye"/>
    </route>

FUSE Mediation Router also supports invoking Bean as an Endpoint. In the route below:

<camelContext id="camel" xmlns="http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring">
  <route>
    <from uri="direct:start"/>
    <to uri="myBean"/>
    <to uri="mock:results"/>
  </route>
</camelContext>

<bean id="myBean" class="org.apache.camel.spring.bind.ExampleBean"/>

What happens is that when the exchange is routed to the myBean FUSE Mediation Router will use the Bean Binding to invoke the bean. The source for the bean is just a plain POJO:

public class ExampleBean {

    public String sayHello(String name) {
        return "Hello " + name + "!";
    }
}

Camel will use Bean Binding to invoke the sayHello method, by converting the Exchange IN body to the String type and store the output of the method on the Exchange OUT body.

How bean methods are chosen to be invoked (if they are not specified explicitly via the method parameter) and how parameter values are constructed from the Message are all defined by the Bean Binding mechanism which is used througout all of the various Bean Integration mechanisms in FUSE Mediation Router.