I was able to fix the problem, after some more experimenting: If I declare the Atom namespace and xsi at the top of myroutes.xml, then I should remove the declaration everywhere else, and dispense with the namespace prefix in my xpath.
This configuration resolved the problem: myroutes.xml: <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:amq="http://activemq.apache.org/schema/core" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xsi:schemaLocation=" http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring/camel-spring.xsd http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/atom.xsd.xml"> <!-- Camel route --> <routeContext id="myroutes" xmlns="http://camel.apache.org/schema/spring"> <route id="nstestexternal"> <from uri="activemq:MyQueue"/> <setHeader headerName="myheader"> <xpath resultType="java.lang.String">/entry/summary</xpath> </setHeader> <to uri="log:my.company.com.nstest?level=INFO&showHeaders=true&showProperties=true"/> </route> </routeContext> </beans> There's no need to declare the Atom namespace anywhere in the camel-context file, then. Thanks again, Ashwin. -- View this message in context: http://camel.465427.n5.nabble.com/Camel-Spring-routeContextRef-and-namespaces-tp3386814p3387896.html Sent from the Camel - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.