Note on splitter and attachments

[Hadrian Zbarcea]

Hi,

In one of my tests a few days back I discovered a bit of an odd thing. 
Camel is working as expected, but a bit weird.

So I was processing messages with attachments all went well, but 
discovered that we don't have an expression that returns the attachments 
on a messages. There is the @Attachments annotation that uses the 
ExpressionBuilder.attachmentsExpression, but that returns the whole map, 
not just the values(). Since Map.Entry<K, V> is generic you cannot use 
an implicit TypeConverter to V, so I had to write my own expression, not 
too bad.

The interesting part was that using my attachments() expression with a 
splitter, returning a Collection you can iterate through works, but the 
splitter replaces the body of the original message with one item in the 
Collection, leaving the attachments in place. I ended up having a bunch 
of messages (as many as attachments, as expected), yet each Message had 
all of the attachments still present. Not a huge deal, but if the 
attachments are larger in size it may become significant.

I don't think there is a one size fits all solution, and I am not in 
favor of introducing yet another configuration in the splitter to remove 
the attachments.

Thoughts?
Hadrian