At one point in our latest project using Apache Camel, I wanted to stop a message from being further processed depending on a condition. This is quite easy to do with the route builder, for example:

from("direct:example")
  .choice()
    .when(header("someheader").isEqualTo("bla"))
      .stop()
  .end()

If you already know that a message needs to be stopped right away in a Processor or a AggregationStrategy, there is an easy way to signal this without a seperate “stop-branch” in the route. You simply set the header ROUTE_STOP to TRUE like this:

if  (....) { // stop here 
      original.setProperty(Exchange.ROUTE_STOP, Boolean.TRUE);
      return original;
}

And the message will not be further processed.