ftp& file polling

can anybody tell taht in which scenario we use file polling n in which scenario we use ftp? and what is differences and advantages?

Hello,

FTP polling is done, when you have partners outside your IS, or the documents is to be polled from outside world, eg, using TN with various TP.

File polling can be used for internal purpose, where it will be in your system or in network system.

Regards

Hello,

we actually use both in one of our solutions. It is within our internal network, where one of our plants FTP’s a file to a network folder on our IS server. We have file polling set up over that folder so the file gets picked up and processed by the flow service.

In most of our outside data transfer solutions though we have documents send to us via HTTP Post directly starting the flow service.

Thanks
Mike

File polling and FTP Scenarios

File polling can be used when the files from your network or from your partners network are to be delivered to a location and if you specifiy this location in IS, then it would be like this /opt/softwareag/shared/test/in/application-name/mon. This scenario is called File polling port. Configuration at IS → security → Ports you can define a new port as an File polling and give the configuration detials with polling time for monitoring the mon directory and execution of a service for each polling interval.

For each polling interval the files in the mon directory were picked up kept at /opt/softwareag/shared/test/in/application-name/work directory for processing and after processing successfully processed files were kept at /opt/softwareag/shared/test/in/application-name/done and error files were kept in /opt/softwareag/shared/test/in/application-name/error

Further details for configuring file poller port can be found at:

webMethods Integration Server
Administrator’s Guide

FTP

In ftp(File transfer protocol) used often when you have an separate File server where the documents were placed. we can do ftp by using service wmpub.cleint.ftp and define a scheduler at IS if we want to run ftp service at defined intervals.

Differences:

  1. File polling port has 4 directories each directory is used at a processing level where this cannot be found in traditional ftp scenarios.

  2. File polling port comes with a default scheduler which we have to configure where in ftp we have to configure scheduler manually for processing documents.

Advantages:

  1. File polling port has the advantage of picking up documents from IS itself where as ftp often uses connecting to other server for picking up documents.

  2. Ftp has an advantage of doing several operations on documents with os commands like picking from location, placing to location put and get, File poller port is capable of only picking the documents from a location.

Regards,
Vikram