Figure 1 shows the adapter, its components, and their relationships within the WebSphere business integration system. The illustration shows a typical configuration. The adapter is configured to exchange messages with a legacy application whose messages flow through the WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker, and to exchange business objects with InterChange Server. The connector is metadata-driven. Message routing and format conversion is initiated by an event polling technique. The connector uses an MQ implementation of the JavaTM Message Service (JMS), an API for accessing enterprise-messaging systems.
Figure 1. Adapter in the WebSphere Business Integration environment
The connector allows collaborations to asynchronously exchange business objects with applications that issue or receive WebSphere MQ messages when changes to data occur.
The connector retrieves WebSphere MQ messages from queues, calls data handlers to convert messages to their corresponding business objects, and then delivers them to collaborations. In the opposite direction, the connector receives business objects from collaborations, converts them into WebSphere MQ messages using the same data handler, and then delivers the message to a WebSphere MQ queue.
Recommendation: You can configure the connector to use any data handler when processing messages. However, since the WebSphere Integration Message Broker can optionally convert any parsable message into XML format, it is highly recommended that you configure the connector to deliver all messages in XML. This means implementing the XML data handler for processing. For an overview and procedure, see Overview of configuring the data handler.