I want my webMethods apps to poll a directory for a file, read the file and insert a record into the database.

To achieve this, I created a configured operation for my File IO Adapter (in Adapters folder). This is an operation type called File Poll where I specify the incoming, working and outgoing directories where the file is supposed to be copied.

I then created a new component in the Integration folder, associate the component to the File IO Adapter.
For the start step, I included the File Poll operation as the trigger. At this stage, the flowchart has got the start and exit step.

Can anyone shed some light as to where/how (in Enterprise Integrator) I can create the steps to read the file and then insert the file into the database?

You have to define a Document Type to mach your data structure. You then insert after the Poll operation a Publish step to publish this document type and map the polled content into the document type. This is on the IO side. Then you have to use a database adapter to subscribe to this document type and do an Insert into your table.
What I also need to do in my implementation is to parse the incoming stream into record fields (using the Fixed Length Input Operation Template) and then publish…which I can’t do…I get an ‘illegal mapping’ error. Maybe you have some idea why?
Hope this helps and thanks,
Simona