Friday, April 4, 2014

BizTalk with codeplex SFTP adapter, doing a file move on AfterGet


A client has a setup with the Codeplex SFTP adapter, reading files from a site and then deleting them when read using the Delete parameter in the AfterGet property within the receive location.
A need arised where the files would need to be moved to an archive folder in the SFTP site instead of being deleted.

There is no mention of this in the documentation of the adapter, however, by checking the underlying code one can see how we can do the move.

The OnBatchComplete method located in BatchHandler.cs, will be called when a message has been sent successfully to BizTalk and hence be removed/renamed on the SFTP server. The line

string renameFileName = CommonFunctions.CombinePath(Path.GetDirectoryName(fileName), batchMessage.AfterGetFilename);

Is the interesting part. We see that when the Rename option is chosen in the adapter properties, the  CombinePath method will be called to create the new full path for the file based on the current directory where it is located, and a new filename. This can be utilized by simply setting the new filename to include a relative path as well as the filename and by doing that create a move of the file and have the rename optional. The latter since the macro replacements will be done after the creation of the full path.

Suppose we read files located in /home/marcus/btstest/ and after reading these should be moved to /home/marcus/btstest/archive/. In this case, you would set the AfterGet File Name property to read archive/%SourceFileName%


If you instead want to move the files to a directory outside of your current path, you can do so by specifying the parent by the usual two dots (..) like for instance ../btstestarchive/%SourceFileName% for the directory located at /home/marcus/btstestarchive/.



One issue can occur though if you use this technique to move files to a file archive in order to have a log on the ftp server side of all files that has been processed. If the filename is already available in the archive folder and the adapter tries to move yet another file to this folder with the same name, it will fail. It will be logged in the event log as "Method: Blogical.Shared.Adapters.Sftp.SharpSsh.Sftp.Rename
Error: Unable to rename /home/marcus/btstest/testfile.xml to /home/marcus/btstest/archive/testfile.xml
", but the original file will be left in the pickup folder on the SFTP site.


BizTalk will not try to process this file again, until you restart the host that is. Then it will be picked up once more, sent to the messagebox and the rename function will fail again. You could make it a bit safer by using the %DateTime% or %UniversalDateTime% macros that also are available besides %SourceFileName%. Yet another option is to extend the BatchHandler.cs with the %MessageID% macro and create a GUID to add to the filename in order to get it truly unique.