After configuring adapter services you can use them as either standalone services or you can construct flows that are built around these services to implement a business process. You create and edit flow services using Designer.

For the most part, Designer's Flow Service Editor provides all the tools needed to do this. However, there may be situations where you must provide additional "translation service objects" in the flow for EJBs that return or expect non-standard Java objects.

For example, you have an EJB that exposes a remote method to create an account, the createAccount method. This method takes as its input parameter a third-party com.foo.bar.Account object. Designer will interpret and present the standard classes provided in Java (for example, java.lang.String, java.lang.Double, long), but it cannot interpret com.foo.bar.Account and, therefore, cannot present this object as anything other than java.lang.Object.

This is acceptable if you can generate a suitable instance of com.foo.bar.Account by calling some other service in your flow prior to invoking createAccount on the EJB. However, if no such service is available, you need to create one. To do so, create a simple standalone translation service that exposes an input signature containing all parameters needed to create a com.foo.bar.Account object. At run time, the user enters values for these parameters. The translation service would then use these values to create an instance of com.foo.bar.Account, which it would then place on its outbound pipeline. In the flow you map this object to the input of the adapter service that invokes createAccount.

For more information about creating flow services that use Adapter for Enterprise Javabeans services, see Creating Flows for Adapter for Enterprise Javabeans Services.