Granularity of Actions

[bsheward]

Hi,

I'm working on building a solution using JBoss ESB, and I'm trying to develop Actions which are reusable, but I'm finding that the Actions that I am writing tend to be incredibly low level, and involve manipulating the Message.

For example, one does a String concatenation on two properties within a Message, and stores it elsewhere within the message, so it can be used by another Action.

Another pulls data from an XML document using XPath, stores it back within the message, so it can be used by another Action.

Am I going about this in the wrong way? It occurred to me that if I was doing thing right, much of this functionality would already exist within JBoss ESB.

Thanks and Regards,

Barry

[kurtstam]

What you should develop is an internal (canonical) message format. You transform to this format on the way in. The all your internal services can interact with the message. Then on the way out you transform it back to a format the destination can consume. A hub-spoke model. This will keep the amount of transformations you need to maintain to a minimum as time goes on.

--Kurt

[bsheward]

Is there any way to expose the entire Message as an XML Document, or any plans to offer a feature like that?