Oracle Apps Knowledge Sharing

BPEL Adapters

What are Adapters?

Adapters are used for efficient integration with back-end applications to optimize the business process. Adapters support a robust, light-weight, highly scalable, and standards-based integration framework, which enables disparate applications to communicate with each other. They are used to integrate packaged applications, legacy applications, databases, and Web services. Using adapters, the user can ensure interoperability by integrating applications that are heterogeneous, provided by different vendors, based on different technologies, and run on different platforms.­­­

The following types of technology adapters are available in BPEL.

·         File/FTP adapter

·         Database adapter

·         Oracle Apps adapter

·         AQ adapter

·         MQ adapter

·         JMS adapter

File/FTP Adapter

The file/FTP adapters enable to configure the BPEL process to interact with local and remote file system directories. The file and FTP adapters can read and write the following file formats and use the adapter translator component at both design time and run time

·         XML (both XSD- and DTD-based)

·         Delimited

·         Fixed positional

·         Binary data

·         COBOL Copybook data

It can also treat file contents as an opaque object.
For inbound file, the file and FTP adapters perform the following operations

·         Poll the file system looking for matches

·         Read and translate the file contents based on the translation logic defined at design time

·         Publish the same as an XML message

For outbound files sent from Oracle BPEL Process Manager, the file and FTP adapters perform the following operations

·         Receive messages from BPEL

·         Format the XML contents as specified at design time

·         Produce output files

For inbound file and FTP adapters have parameters for the inbound directory where the input file appears, the file naming pattern and the frequency with which to poll the directory.

Database Adapter

The database adapter enables a BPEL process to communicate with Oracle databases or third-party databases through JDBC.

The following operations are supported in the Database adapter

• Call a Stored procedure or a function
• Perform a table operation which can be one of the following

Ø  Insert Only

Ø  Update Only

Ø  Insert or Update

Ø  Update

Ø  Select

• Poll for new or changed records in a table
• Execute Custom SQL

Before connecting to a database through the database adapter, the database connection must be created and configured for that particular database using the Database Connection Wizard.

Oracle Applications Adapter  

The Oracle Apps adapter enables to interact with various interfaces of an Oracle Apps instance that is hosted in a given database connection.

It offers a rich set of object invocation which includes concurrent programs, XML gateway, EDI sources, business events apart form tables, views and APIs which can be invoked even through the database adapter.

It offers support for open interface imports, and other such things that can be done in the Oracle Apps.

AQ Adapter

It provides a flexible mechanism for bidirectional, asynchronous communication between two applications that uses Queues as a medium to pass on information to each other.

The enqueue operation is outbound while the dequeue operation is inbound thus the AQ adapter is both the producer and consumer of the AQ messages.

Specify the operation whether it is an Enqueue or Dequeue and the queue name from which the message is to be enqueued or dequeued