Hi, @Christian: That would mean, I have to hold the value for the header in my camel.xml and that's not what I need. I need it in a separate file :-/ Thank's anyway.
@Bilgin: That's the way it works :-) Thank you. For others: you need to define a propertyPlaceholder in the context to use external properties: camel.properties ----------------------- header.value = foobar camel.xml --------------- <camelContext id="camel" xmlns="http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring"> <propertyPlaceholder id="properties" location="camel.properties"/> <route> ..... <setHeader headerName="foobarHeader"> <simple>${properties:header.value}</simple> </setHeader> <log message="set header >>foobarHeader<< to value ${properties:header.value}" loggingLevel="INFO" /> ... </route> <camelContext> best, christoph