This technical article by Chad W. Coffman discusses how File Adapters are often used as a Receive activity in a BPEL process, polling a directory for a file to arrive and starting based on the state of the file - number of records, filename pattern, directory location, etc. But what if the file adapter is not used as the initiating activity? The adapter configuration options change when the adapter is configured to work 'inline' (synchronous read or write operation) instead of at the beginning of the BPEL process. And one of the first configuration options that apparently goes away is the ability to specify the directory of a file that is either being read or written.