Patent ID: 8095497

Claim:
A system for handling a eCommerce request received from one of a plurality of requesting entities, comprising: a processor; a flow manager which, when executed by the processor, is configured to utilize runtime metadata to perform a process to map the request from an original format to a transformed format and to call one or more of at least two applications to process the received request, wherein the at least two applications are each configured to process requests in a corresponding transformed format; wherein a first application is configured to process a request of a first request type and a second application is configured to process a request of a second request type; wherein the runtime metadata comprises at least two access methods each configured to define an interface for the at least two applications, the at least two access methods comprising a first access method configured for the first request type and for the first application and a second access method configured for the second request type and for the second application; and wherein the process performed by the flow manager to map the request comprises: identifying which of the at least two applications the runtime metadata specifies for handling the request; invoking an instance of the access method configured for the identified application; retrieving, via the instance of the access method, a list of field elements described as inputs for the transformed format; for each field element in the list, determining and retrieving a corresponding value from the received request in the original format based on the runtime metadata; generating a data structure having the transformed format, the data structure comprising the retrieved values; invoking the identified application to process the request utilizing the generated data structure.