Can Trading Partners pull from an IS FTP account?

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1

I’ve been searching around the forums and looking through documents and haven’t seen any regarding how a Trading Partner could log into an FTP account in IS and pull files from wM. Or to be more precise, how you place a file into an account for the TP to pull. Is this possible?

All the documents seem to indicate the use of FTP pushes either from TN or as a direct flow service. This is fine for some connections but not all.

In our experience, when you set a connection up with a Trading Partner, either we or they will initiate the connection depending on how it’s been set up. We never have connections where we both initiate.

This means that if the data flow is bidirectional, then whoever initiates has to pull AND push the data.

Thanks in advance,
Mark

PS: I’m still relatively new to wM, so keep it simple please :slight_smile:

2

Review the TN documentation regarding trading partner polling.

3

Well I’ve had a look at the trading partner polling info, and it’s not exactly very clear on what to do. Why can’t wM docs just say, to implement this, do this, this and this?

All I want to do is deliver a document to a queue (or somewhere) that a Trading Partner can then use FTP/s to login, ls for the files and then pull them. Seems a straight forward function to me.

The User guide has a section called ‘Defining Queue for Polling’, in the first paragraph is says ‘Trading Networks does not deliver the documents in this queue. Instead, Trading Networks waits for a partner to poll for the documents.’

Which seems exactly what I want, but it doesn’t give any information on how to set one up!

4

I usually avoid using TN polling (apologies for steering you that way).

Instead, I have TN deliver to an internal FTP server. Then the partner pulls from that FTP server.

5

It amazes me that for a product aimed at integration and communications, it seems to have what I would consider to be very basic functionality missing!

Thanks for your input.

6

I’ve just had a though, as users and accounts can be managed by wM for incoming data FTP, FTP/s etc.

i.e. set up an FTP or FTP/s port, then a TP user account.

This then by default creates a user directory under IntegrationServer/userFtpRoot

Is there any reason I can just put a file in the users account directory and get them to pull from there?

I’ve just tried it manually, and wm/IS doesn’t seem to have any issues with running the pull or del commands. No errors reported etc.

This would save us from having to set up 3rd party software for FTP/s.

And we already have a service for extracting data to the file system, as we needed this for other comms applications (Connect: Direct and sftp).

Thanks,
Mark

7

Hmm. I’m learning something today! I had never noticed the IS/userFtpRoot directory before. Looks like it was introduced in 6.5. Bummer that this wasn’t more prevalently described in the docs–it’s in the enhancements and fixes HTML doc and then buried in an appendix of the Admin guide. A good addition!

That would indeed be a good way to go!

8

I’m learning that the docs aren’t always that good with wm. With what seem like important things hidden away into some pdf that doesn’t seem to have any logical relevance to the subject. Using keyword search in Windows is becoming my normal way to find things in wm docs.

We didn’t use wm till 6.5 (a new service only implemented late last year) and the training only covered this new way of using FTP (although only for incoming data). The old way, direct into wm, wasn’t even mentioned so I didn’t even know there was another option.

Cheers