An adapter provides entry and exit points for an integration server. Adapters are responsible for knowing the application metadata, its data models, extracting and delivering data from the application at run-time, exception handling, and handling any error conditions while interacting with the application. Modifying the adapters by modifying the code is more burdensome and costly than declaring the requirements in the integration server.
Adapters perform the following functions:
Obtain metadata from external data sources to a message broker format repository or document type definition (DTD).
Read data from sources such as applications, files, databases, and data streams, and place the data on a message transport.
Write data to targets such as applications, files, databases, and data streams, after getting the data from a message transport. See the following section for additional information about message transport.
