Changing the Archive File Name in Inbound File/FTP Adapter

Requirement:

To customize the archive file name, remove the junk characters from the archived file name. The default format is as under.

SOA 10g - filename_yyyymmdd_hh24mmss
SOA 11g - filename_encryptedToken_yyyymmdd_hh24mmss (new format introduced with 11g)

The possible customization is given in the solution below.

Solution:

SOA 10g: 

You have a JCA property for FIle/FTP adapter, UseLongArchiveFileName, which can be used to prefix the process name to the archive filename to make the format filename_processname_timestamp.

SOA 11g (11.1.1.3/+) 

UseLongArchiveFileName is not available in 11g. Apply Patch 10155914 and it will become available.    

SOA 11g (11.1.1.5/+) 

Apply Patch 13249896.
A new property  UseDigest can be used now in addition to  UseLongArchiveFileName (11g format as filename_processname_digest_timestamp) with File/FTP adapter.
By default UseDigest is set to true which leads to the digest (encrypted token) being sandwiched in the filename and timestamp as filename_digest_timestamp.
Setting this property to false will change the format to filename_timetamp. To use this property edit the .jca file to include this property as given below.

SOA 11g (11.1.1.7/+)

UseDigest property will be available by default without the need to apply the above patch.

There is, however, no further customization possible (presently) in terms of adding instance id to the file name or specifying custom file name. Hope the same gets available in the 11.1.1.7(+) or 12C version.

Polling files on-demand : File Based Triggers

Many a times there is a need to trigger the polling of File/FTP Adapter on the basis of some event e.g. after process A has finished writing the file F1, process B should poll for the file F1 OR just process the files only between 10.00 AM to 11.00 AM. While the above could be accomplished to some extent using Sync Read operation, but it requires the knowledge of the File Name in advance (wild cards can't be used).

Well, the solution is File-Based Triggers. File-based triggers can be used to control the File/FTP adapter activation. File Triggers are nothing but the files with .trg extension. The content of trigger file doesn't matter. When File-based triggers are used, File/FTP adapter checks for the existence of a Trigger file (e.g. ReadFile.trg) before reading the actual file. If the trigger file is found, it reads and processes the actual file else it does nothing. You can configure how frequently the adapter checks for the trigger file and hence can control the processing of the actual files.
To use a File-Based trigger, follow the below steps.
1.) Define a File/FTP adapter with Read Operation.
2.) On the File Polling page, Check the option Use trigger file and provide the Trigger File details as shown below.

3.) Complete the adapter wizard.
4.) Follow the normal steps to create a bpel process to poll the file. Deploy this process.

As soon as the process is deployed, File/FTP adapter looks for the trigger file in the C:/TriggerFileDir location. If it finds the triger file, it will poll and process the file. How frequently it looks for the trigger file depends on the property TriggerFileStrategy (we didn't specify this property anywhere because the property is set already by default to value EndpointActivation).

The various possible values for TriggerFileStrategy are:
OnceOnly: The adapter will looks for the trigger file only once in its lifetime. Once it finds the trigger file, it remembers that across restarts and redeployments. This could be very risky as the adapter would never look for a trigger file again in future.

EveryTime: The adapter looks for the trigger file everytime it goes for polling the file. At every polling interval, it checks if the trigger file is there or not. If the trigger file is present, it picks the actual file else it will do nothing and will check for the existence of trigger file at next polling cycle.

EndpointActivation (Default): The adapter looks for the trigger file every time the composite is activated that means everytime you Restart/Activate/Redeploy your composite.

Add the property in .jca file of your File Adapter as shown below and it's done.

Note: You may want to delete the Trigger file after your file has been successfully processed. For this, there is no Delete operation. But you can use Sync Read operation to read the trigger file and check Delete Files after successful retrieval option.

Happy to hear back if any suggestions or comments!

How to pass JNDI name dynamically to an Adapter

Recently, I've been trying configure an MQ adapter that could enqueue data of any structure into specified queue based on the specified JNDI, all passed dynamically at runtime. This post decsribes how you can pass the JNDI Name dynamically to an Adapter.

All you have to do is define a String variable (say myJndiName) that stores your JNDI name (eis/MQ/someThing...already configured on Weblogic) and pass this variable into Invoke Activity properties directly in the .bpel source.   

Note that you'll not be able to find this property in the Invoke Activity > Properties tab.

And that's it. You can assign different values on the fly to the variable myJndiName and same adapter can enqueue in different JNDI locations. It also works for FTP and JMS adapters too.