Adapters
InterSystems IRIS provides communication with external interfaces using adapters.
Email
Email adapters are InterSystems IRIS processes. They use TCP/IP to send/receive email from an email server. Outbound adapters send mail to a SMTP server. Inbound adapters poll for relevant (filtered) messages from a POP3 serve. Email servers are likely to be on a remote server, so while there would be no local process, the remote system would need to be reachable through a firewall
File
File Input Adapters are InterSystems IRIS processes. They periodically inspect a directory they have been configured to monitor, read files that appear there, pass the files to the Business Service they have been configured to support, and move the files to the configured archive directory. The EnsLib.File.InboundAdapterOpens in a new tab class provides the implementation. The FilePath, WorkPath, and ArchivePath properties define the input, temporary work, and archive directories, respectively.
File Output Adapters are employed by production Business Operations to write data to files. The file path and file name are specified by the Business Operation and operations on the file are invoked by calling methods of the EnsLib.File.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab class. Messages are usually queued to a worker job that performs the actual output operation. This implies the existence of Ens.QueueOpens in a new tab processes.
FTP
InterSystems IRIS acts as a client for FTP communication with remote FTP servers using the %Net.FtpSessionOpens in a new tab class. The %Net.FtpSessionOpens in a new tab class can be configured to use PASV for the data channel to avoid an inbound connection. InterSystems IRIS provides FTP inbound and outbound adapters. Both act as FTP clients to get (input) or put (output) under the control of a Business Service created by the customer. The FTP server and port are configurable. The FTP adapters are InterSystems IRIS processes.
Java Gateway
Production adapters use the Java Gateway to communicate through a Java intermediary process. A Java process is started which depends on the existence of a Java Virtual Machine. The InterSystems IRIS server process communicates with the Java process via a TCP connection. The TCP ports used are configurable.
Pipe
The classes EnsLib.Pipe.InboundAdapterOpens in a new tab and EnsLib.Pipe.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab enable productions to invoke operating system commands or shell scripts. They create a process external to InterSystems IRIS and communicate with it via a pipe, so an external process will exist while the Pipe adapter is communicating with it. The command that the process runs is determined by the value assigned to the CommandLine property of the adapter class.
SAP
The Java Gateway is used to communicate with the SAP Java Connector using classes imported with the EnlLib.SAP.BootStrap class ImportSAP method.
SQL
The SQL inbound and outbound adapters enable productions to communicate with JDBC or ODBC-compliant databases. In general, the inbound SQL adapter (EnsLib.SQL.InboundAdapterOpens in a new tab) periodically executes a query and then iterates through the rows of the result set, passing one row at a time to the associated business service. The SQL adapters use the underlying capabilities of InterSystems SQL and JDBC Gateways.
TCP
InterSystems IRIS provides input and output TCP adapters. Each TCP inbound adapter checks for data on a specified port, reads the input, and sends the input as a stream to the associated business service. Within a production, an outbound TCP adapter is associated with a business operation that you create and configure. The business operation receives a message from within the production, looks up the message type, and executes the appropriate method in the outbound TCP adapter to transmit the data over TCP.
Telnet
InterSystems IRIS provides the EnsLib.Telnet.OutboundAdapterOpens in a new tab which permits outbound telnet connections to the telnet facility on another system. This adapter provides methods to programmatically emulate the effect of manually logging in to the remote system using telnet client software. The InterSystems IRIS TCP device is the underlying technology.