In iWay Service Manager, a channel serves as a container of specific iWay components, such as listeners, preparers, transforms, process flows, and emitters, through which a document containing messages or data pass. All channels must contain three sub-containers, an inlet (which is the entry point to the channel), a route (which defines the path through the channel), and an outlet (which defines how the document leaves the channel). You can create new iWay components or use existing components to configure a channel.

Using our example, we first need to extract the XML structure from our database and place the documents into a directory we can access for later use. To do this, we will create a simple channel with:

• An inlet that contains an RDBMS listener. This listener monitors the data source that holds the information we want accessible to a search.
• A route that provides a path for documents to move through the channel from the inlet to the outlet. Since we just want to capture an incoming document and no processing is required for this step, we will use the default route provided by iWay. The default route (named move) is empty and acts as a placeholder for the route element.
• An outlet with a file emitter that will output the XML files to a designated directory.

Note: All RDBMS listeners generate XML representations of table records. Once this channel is deployed, we can generate a sample XML file from which we can extract the XML structure needed in the indexing process flow.

Using the RDBMS adapter requires its corresponding JAR file to be added to the iWay environment (located in the \iWay\lib directory by default) and requires iWay to be restarted. For more information on installation requirements for the RDBMS adapter, see the iWay Installation Guide.

As a reminder, we will be designing the components of our channel and configuring the channel in the Registry (the design-time repository). We will then deploy the channel to a run-time iWay Service Manager and activate it to begin the indexing process.

The following is a summary of the steps involved in setting up the iWay channel. This section provides instructions for each of these steps.

• Configure the listener
• Create the inlet containing the listener
• Create the emitter
• Create the outlet containing the emitter
• Create the channel
• Activate the channel