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Developing Adapters

Adapter Setup Worksheet

Use the worksheet on the following page to collect critical information about the adapter you are developing. The questions on the worksheet will help you define components, such as the logical name of the adapter and the basename of the Java package. They can also help you determine the locales for which you need to localize message bundles. Your answers to these questions will help you define your adapter before you start coding.

Note: If you are using the GenerateAdapterTemplate utility, it is especially important for you to use the worksheet; the answers you provide are essential to your ability to run this utility successfully.

Adapter Setup Worksheet

Before you begin developing an adapter, answer as many of the following questions as you can. If you plan to use the GenerateAdapterTemplate utility, you must answer every question marked by an asterisk (*).

1. *What is the name of the EIS for which you are developing an adapter?

2. *Which version of the EIS are you using?

3. *Which type (such as DBMS or ERP) of the EIS are you using?

4. *What is the name of the vendor for this adapter?

5. *Which version of the adapter are you using?

6. *What is the logical name of the adapter?

7. Does the adapter need to invoke functionality within the EIS?

   If so, then your adapter needs to support services.

8. What mechanism and/or API is provided by the EIS to allow an external program to invoke functionality provided by the EIS?

9. What information is needed to create a session and/or connection to the EIS for this mechanism?

10. What information is needed to determine which function(s) will be invoked in the EIS for a given service?

11. Does the EIS allow you to query it for input and output requirements for a given function?

    If so, what information is needed to determine the input requirements for the service?

12. Which of the input requirements are static across all requests? Your adapter should encode static information in an InteractionSpec object.

13. Which of the input requirements are dynamic per request? Your adapter should provide an XML schema that describes the input parameters required by this service per request.

14. What information is needed to determine the output requirements for the service?

15. Does the EIS provide a mechanism to browse a catalog of functions your adapter can invoke? If so, your adapter should support browsing of services.

16. Does the adapter need to receive notifications of changes that occur inside the EIS? If so, then your adapter needs to support events.

17. What mechanism and/or API is provided by the EIS to allow an external program to receive notification of events in the EIS? The answer to this question will help determine whether a pull mechanism or a push mechanism is developed.

18. Does the EIS provide a way to determine which events your adapter can support?

19. Does the EIS provide a way to query for metadata for a given event?

20. What locales (defined by language and country) does your adapter need to support?