12 Working with JCA Resource Adapters

Understanding JCA Resource Adapter Connectivity Options

A resource adapter provides the following types of connectivity between an application and an EIS.

• Outbound communication: The resource adapter allows an application to connect to an EIS system and perform work. The application initiates all communication. The resource adapter serves as a passive library for connecting to an EIS, and executes in the context of the application threads.

• Inbound communication: The resource adapter allows an EIS to call application components and perform work. The EIS initiates all communication. The resource adapter can request threads from the application server or create its own threads.

• Bi-directional communication: The resource adapter supports both outbound and inbound communication.

Understanding JCA Resource Adapters with Network Integrity

This chapter describes productized SNMP JCA resource adapter and 3rd party or customized JCA resource adapters, and their use within Network Integrity.

Network Integrity administrators can configure the productized SNMP JCA resource adapter included with the Network Integrity software. Network Integrity system integrators can extend this SNMP JCA resource adapter with additional MIB files at run time to poll additional SNMP object identifiers (OIDs).

In addition to the productized JCA resource adapter for use with SNMP, Network Integrity system integrators can also use any standard J2EE JCA resource adapters (3rd party or customized) in their customized Network Integrity cartridge. They can deploy these resource adapters wherever the Network Integrity application is deployed. These adapters can be standalone, or clustered within a Weblogic server.

Network Integrity cartridges can:

• use a deployed resource adapter

• communicate with various network devices

• send commands

• collect data through various protocols (for example, SNMP, TLI, or CORBA)

See Oracle Communications Design Studio Developer's Guide for details on creating a Network Integrity cartridge project. See Network Integrity Installation Guide for details on deploying an SNMP JCA resource adapter.

Installing the SNMP JCA Resource Adapter

The SNMP resource adapter installs as part of the Network Integrity Installer. See Network Integrity Installation Guide for more details.

Building a JCA Resource Adapter in WebLogic

To create a JCA resource adapter for use in a customized Network Integrity cartridge, see:

https://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/web.1111/e13732/toc.htm

This Fusion Middleware document provides detailed instructions for creating a resource adapter in Weblogic.

Invoking a Third Party or Customized JCA Resource Adapter

The following workflow describes the steps required to implement third party or customized JCA resource adapters in Network Integrity.

1. Deploy third party or customized JCA resource adapters into the Network Integrity system.

2. Implement a Design Studio discovery processor to invoke the third party or customized JCA resource adapter.

   1. Locate the following code auto-generated from the discovery processor.

      @Override
      public SampleProcessorResponse invoke(DiscoveryProcessorContext context
                      SampleProcessorRequest request) throws ProcessorException {
           // TODO Auto-generated method stub
       return null;
      } 
      

   2. Use the SampleProcessorRequest generated class to obtain the address scope, property group, and other attributes.

      Tip:

      This class provides important elements used when invoking a resource adapter. For example, to use a TL1 resource adapter to make a TL1 request, the TL1 resource adapter needs to know which device it should communication with. This information is obtained from the SampleProcessorRequest in the following sources:

      • IP address: available from the address scope

      • port number: available from the property group

      • login information for the TL1 session including username and password: available from the property group

   3. Use the data provided by SampleProcessorRequest to implement the Java code to invoke the JCA resource adapter.

Depending on the resource adapter, the way to invoke a resource adapter can different. Typically the invoke process requires several JNDI name lookups to get some JCA Connection Factory and Interaction Specification classes. From the JCA Connection Factory, the user can create Interaction. Next is to do the execution from Interaction by passing the Interaction Specification.

If user is using an existing 3rd party resource adapter, it should come with a developer guide that provides the detailed instruction on how to implement the client code to invoke this resource adapter. If a user creates a customized resource adapter from scratch, the user should have all the knowledge on how to invoke this customized JCA resource adapter.

The following code snippet demonstrates how to invoke a JCA resource adapter that implements Common Client Interface (CCI):

…
context = new InitialContext();            
SampleAdapterConnectionSpecImpl cspec =
                (SampleAdapterConnectionSpecImpl)context.lookup(JNDI_SAMPLE_CONN_SPEC);
cxFactory = (ConnectionFactory) context.lookup(JNDI_SAMPLE_CONN_FACTORY);
connection = cxFactory.getConnection(cspec);
ispec = (SampleAdapterInteractionSpec)context.lookup(JNDI_SAMPLE_INTER_SPEC);
interaction = connection.createInteraction();
RecordFactory recordFactory = cxFactory.getRecordFactory();
IndexedRecord input = recordFactory.createIndexedRecord(SampleAdapterIndexedRecord.INPUT);
input.add(request);
IndexedRecord output = recordFactory.createIndexedRecord(SampleAdapterIndexedRecord.OUTPUT);
interaction.execute(ispec, input, output);
out=(String)output.get(SampleAdapterIndexedRecord.MESSAGE_FIELD);    
…

In this example, the ”out” contains the collected results as an XML document as String. However, different resource adapter have different output. To detail all possible kinds of output is beyond the scope of this document.

The final output should be wrapped inside the SampleProcessorResponse class (code-generated) and return as the returned value of this invoke method.