Planning Adapter Areas

Most external systems require only a single Adapter Area but, depending on your situation, you may need to implement multiple adapter areas.

However, you may want to create multiple Adapter Areas for the same system if, for example, you want to load many different types of data and/or metadata from the same system. This is true of the Oracle Clinical adapter, which has a single Adapter Domain containing multiple Adapter Areas, one for each type of data or metadata loaded.

You need multiple Adapter Areas if the Load Sets, Programs, Data Marts, or Business Areas created for your external system require:

• Different define-time or runtime Parameters; see Planning Parameters and Parameter Sets.
• Different predefined fixed data structures matching those in the external system; see Planning Data Structures.

Your adapter may need multiple technology types but only one adapter type; for example, if your external system is required both as an integrated development environment (IDE) and for execution. The IDE part of the adapter may not require an Adapter Domain or Adapter Area or any other defined objects, but only a technology type and custom functions (primarily the Build_IDE_Cfg_Function). This is true if the IDE requires the user to log in (as SAS does). If the adapter does not require the user to log in , you need to create an Adapter Domain, Adapter Area and other objects.