File Poller in BusinessWorks

Question

In the BW Designer, File Poller can look for file in the local server where the Designer is installed.

But If I want the File Poller to look at another server instead of the local server, I don't see any option to do that.

Is there any other way so that I can use File Poller to look on any other server and poll file from that server instead of the server where the Designer is installed?

Thanks

Answer 1

The File Poller can only access files and directories visible to the system the engine is running on, so you need to mount a network drive to poll files sitting on a remote server.

Another option would be to build a custom polling mechanism using the FTP Palette. You could use a Timer instead of a File Poller. On the first execution, the process would list the files in the remote folder using the FTP Dir activity then store this list in a Shared Variable. This list would contain the file names, last modification dates, etc.

Every time the process is triggered, it would run FTP Dir to compare the current list of files against the previous one to detect any changes (new files, modified files, etc.) then update the Shared Variable to keep the latest image of the remote folder. You could then run FTP Get to retrieve any new or modified file.