The three adapter components process and manage the data flows to and from the brokers. They are described below.
The integration channel is the link between Ariba Buyer and the connector. Ariba Buyer communicates with the channel using the Ariba Messaging Framework (AMF). The AMF is used by the application to send message objects to the channel, and by the channel to send objects to the application.
Communication between the AMF and the channel occurs whenever:
Service call events are sent by the connector to the first available channel node, which relays the event to the application.
For more information, see Understanding business objects, and Generating business object definitions.
Connectors consist of two parts: the application-specific component and the controller and communications framework. The application-specific component contains code tailored to a particular application or technology (in this case, Ariba Buyer). The controller and communications framework, whose code is common to all connectors, act as an intermediary between the integration broker and the application-specific component by providing the following services:
The connector for Ariba Buyer communicates with the application through the integration channel.
The integration channel and connector communicate with each other at run time. The message object originates in an Ariba Buyer node and is passed to the integration channel through the AMF. The integration channel sends the message object to the connector.
The connector maps the business object data contained in the message object to an application-specific business object, using a definition stored in the broker repository, and sends it to the broker. It may also receive business objects from the broker for delivery to Ariba Buyer. These business objects are sent back through the channel instance for the Ariba Buyer node that initiated the exchange.
For more information, see Understanding business objects, and "Generating business object definitions".
The Object Discovery Agent (ODA) is a design-time tool used to create business object definitions from Ariba Buyer-specific metadata. The ODA uses that metadata to build the business object definitions.
Two types of metadata are exported by the integration channel:
Metadata can be exported from the primary node of an Ariba Buyer instance running in development mode. The ODA reads these files and uses the information to create business object definitions in the integration broker repository. During run time, the connector can use these definitions to transform message objects into application-specific business objects.
Ariba Buyer provides an interface that notifies the integration channel about any changes to the metadata. The channel receives this information from the AMF through a listener and automatically saves it to the metadata repository.
For more information, see Understanding business objects, and "Generating business object definitions".