The adapter for Ariba Buyer enables Ariba Buyer to communicate with external applications such as SAP, Oracle Financials, and PeopleSoft.
The adapter includes three primary components:
Required by Ariba Buyer to communicate with target applications. It runs as a component of Ariba Buyer and communicates with the connector remotely.
Acts as an intermediary between the integration broker and the application in the transfer of data. The connector is metadata-driven.
A design-time tool that reads metadata exported by the application and converts it into business object definitions. The connector uses these definitions at run time to convert application data into business objects.
Figure 1 shows how these adapter components work together. They are described in detail in Adapter components.
Figure
1. Adapter architecture
Ariba Buyer may be run in a multi-node configuration with the nodes all on one machine, or distributed across many machines in a multi-server configuration--provided that all the servers run the same operating system. In a multi-server configuration, each machine has at least one node. However, there is only one instance of the connector, regardless of the number of nodes.
Each node runs in its own process and communicates with its own instance of the integration channel, but all nodes communicate with the same Ariba Buyer application database.
Run-time event flows are bi-directional, and the direction depends on where the event originates.
For events originating from Ariba Buyer:
For events originating from the integration broker: