The cron scheduled route policy is a route policy that enables you to start, stop, suspend, and resume routes, where the timing of these events is specified using cron expressions. To define a cron scheduled route policy, create an instance of the following class:

org.apache.camel.routepolicy.quartz.CronScheduledRoutePolicy

The simple scheduled route policy depends on the Quartz component, camel-quartz. For example, if you are using Maven as your build system, you would need to add a dependency on the camel-quartz artifact.

Example 10 shows how to schedule a route to start up using the Java DSL. The policy is configured with the cron expression, */3 * * * * ?, which triggers a start event every 3 seconds.

In Java DSL, you attach the route policy to the route by calling the routePolicy() DSL command in the route.

// Java
CronScheduledRoutePolicy policy = new CronScheduledRoutePolicy();
policy.setRouteStartTime("*/3 * * * * ?");
                
from("direct:start")
    .routeId("test")
    .routePolicy(policy)
    .to("mock:success");;

	Note
	You can specify multiple policies on the route by calling routePolicy() with multiple arguments.

Example 11shows how to schedule a route to start up using the XML DSL.

In XML DSL, you attach the route policy to the route by setting the routePolicyRef attribute on the route element.

<bean id="date" class="org.apache.camel.routepolicy.quartz.SimpleDate"/>

<bean id="startPolicy" class="org.apache.camel.routepolicy.quartz.CronScheduledRoutePolicy">
    <property name="routeStartTime" value="*/3 * * * * ?"/>
</bean>
    
<camelContext xmlns="http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring">
    <route id="testRoute" routePolicyRef="startPolicy">
        <from uri="direct:start"/>
        <to uri="mock:success"/>
    </route>
</camelContext>

	Note
	You can specify multiple policies on the route by setting the value of routePolicyRef as a comma-separated list of bean IDs.

The cron expression syntax has its origins in the UNIX cron utility, which schedules jobs to run in the background on a UNIX system. A cron expression is effectively a syntax for wildcarding dates and times that enables you to specify either a single event or multiple events that recur periodically.

A cron expression consists of 6 or 7 fields in the following order:

Seconds Minutes Hours DayOfMonth Month DayOfWeek [Year]

The Year field is optional and usually omitted, unless you want to define an event that occurs once and once only. Each field consists of a mixture of literals and special characters. For example, the following cron expression specifies an event that fires once every day at midnight:

0 0 24 * * ?

The * character is a wildcard that matches every value of a field. Hence, the preceding expression matches every day of every month. The ? character is a dummy placeholder that means ignore this field. It always appears either in the DayOfMonth field or in the DayOfWeek field, because it is not logically consistent to specify both of these fields at the same time. For example, if you want to schedule an event that fires once a day, but only from Monday to Friday, use the following cron expression:

0 0 24 ? * MON-FRI

Where the hyphen character specifies a range, MON-FRI. You can also use the forward slash character, /, to specify increments. For example, to specify that an event fires every 5 minutes, use the following cron expression:

0 0/5 * * * ?

For a full explanation of the cron expression syntax, see the Wikipedia article on CRON expressions.

You can use a cron scheduled route policy to define one or more of the following scheduling tasks:

The following table lists the parameters for scheduling one or more route starts.

The following table lists the parameters for scheduling one or more route stops.

The following table lists the parameters for scheduling the suspension of a route one or more times.

The following table lists the parameters for scheduling the resumption of a route one or more times.