> i'm looking at inbound recovery (via the ResourceAdapter.getXAResouces(...) call) and from the perspective of an application writer
Application writer? Last I heard you were an MQ dev at IBM, not an end user. The first part of that sentence does make sense though - you're basically referring to JCA 1.5 section 12.5.2 I think.
> and it came as something of a surprise that this might not work 'out of the box'.
If you can say that with a straight face you've not been watching enough youtube :-)
As far an I can tell from a quick poke though the JCA code, it does not call ResourceAdapter.getXAResources(javax.resource.spi.ActivationSpec[] activationSpecs) I'm guessing that's an implementation decision based on the assumption that a call to ManagedConnection.getXAResource().recover() will return equivalent information instead.