Inbound HTTP component

The Inbound HTTP component is able to receive messages through HTTP requests. It will act like a webservice that listens for HTTP requests. Once a message is received, it's content will be handed to the next component in the flow.

Configuration

The Inbound HTTP component has the following configuration options:

• Endpoint
• Protocol
• Tenant part
• Match prefix?
• Preserve HTTP Headers
• Exchange pattern

Endpoint

Description

A URL to identify this component's endpoint.

Remarks

• The Endpoint name can only contain letters, numbers and these special characters: @, ., _, +, ~, ?.
• The Endpoint name should contain between 3 and 50 characters.

Protocol

Options

• http
• https (default)

Description

Select which protocol will be used to by the web service.

Tenant part

Options

• Tenant ID (default)
• Tenant name

Description

Select which part of the tenant is used in the URL.

Match prefix?

Options

• Yes
• No (default)

Description

Whether you want use the URL of the endpoint as a prefix. See Reaching the webservice with wildcards for more info.

Preserve HTTP headers

Options

• Yes
• No (default)

Description

Whether you want to keep the Camel HTTP headers on the exchange instead of removing them from the exchange.

Exchange pattern

Options

• One way
• Request reply (default)

Description

This option determines how the component handles the incoming messages. By default it Request reply is selected. This means that the component will reply to a incoming message with the result of the flow for that incoming message.

When you don't need the result of the flow for the message you sent, then you can select One way as exchange pattern. When the component receives your message it will respond with status 200 OK and with the body you sent.

See Behavior of the component for more information.

Remarks

• For Request reply the timeout option of the flow may need to be increased when the flow takes some time to process the incoming messages.
• The response to the caller will be the existing Exchange body before reaching the first One way component in the flow.
• When there is an Outbound flow link component somewhere in the flow you should be cautious with selecting Request reply when the Outbound flow link has One way selected for its exchange pattern option. There could be some timeouts because the Inbound HTTP component will keep waiting till it receives the processed message to sent back to the caller.

Remarks

• An Inbound HTTP component should always be the first component in the flow.

Reaching the webservice

HTTP

An Inbound HTTP with the following settings:

• Endpoint named dovetail_test,
• Protocol set to http,
• Tenant part set to Tenant ID

Will have a webservice URL that looks like this (tenant id varies):

http://[host name]:9000/584936/dovetail_test

HTTPS

An Inbound HTTP with the following settings:

• Endpoint named dovetail_test
• Protocol set to https
• Tenant part set to Tenant name

Will have a webservice URL that looks like this (tenant name varies):

https://[host name]/inbound_http/test/dovetail/dovetail_test

Remark

The old format of the HTTPS URL's is still supported, but just now shown in the UI. The URL above will look like this in the old format:

https://[host name]:[port]/dovetail/dovetail_test

The port is 8001 for Test and 9001 for production.

Reaching the webservice with wildcards

By default the webservice will only match the exact URL that is specified in the Endpoint property. In the examples above it is only possible to reach the webservice by sending messages to the exact /dovetail/dovetail_test URL. If you also want to reach the same webservice with /dovetail/dovetail_test/user you can set the Match prefix? property to Yes. This way /dovetail/dovetail_test is the prefix for your webservice and it can be reached with messages that use different URL's. You can get the URL of the exchange using the header called CamelHttpUri. Which is available on the exchange when the Preserve HTTP Headers option is set to Yes.

Testing the webservice

You can use a REST client, such as POSTMAN, to send messages to the Inbound HTTP component in Dovetail. This makes it possible to manually send test data to the flow.

To send messages you wil need to:

1. Enter the URL of the webservice as described above.
2. Set the dropdown to POST
3. Choose message format RAW
4. Paste a message body (e.g. XML data) in the text area field.
5. Click Send to submit the message

If you want to see if the message has been processed succesfully by Dovetail, you can open the respective flow in the Flow Manager and go the Logging section.

Behavior of the component

The Inbound HTTP Component will by default always send back the result of the flow, even when the flow is asynchronous. This is determined by the exchange pattern which is Request reply by default. In the following diagram it is visually explained:

In some cases this is not desired, depending on the size and complexity of the flow it can take some time until the Inbound HTTP Component gets back a result from the flow. Some clients like POSTMAN wait till they get a response, but other clients or applications don't wait long enough and get a timeout. If you always want to get back a response immediately you can set the exchange pattern to One way. The response will be of status 200 OK and the the body that was sent will also be sent back.

Remarks

• The maximum size of a body that can be uploaded is 1 Mb.