Along came a File Adapter, Mr. 'FTP' and Rest of the Gang

[Shabarish_Nair]

Ok... So if you are a regular reader of the XI blog section, you might be wondering "What's with this guy and the FILE Adapter " Well, to tell you the fact ... I just seem to be obsessed with it

Jokes apart ... this blog intends to help out the beginners with their queries(some) about the File Adapter, FTP, the folder names and various other errors (leaving out Content conversion here cos we already have enough of blogs on the same) that pop up as frequent posts in the forum. 

Now the first thing, How can I pick a file from my local machine? The answer is FTP and all you need to do is to configure a FTP server on your local machine.   So How do you do that ? There are actually various free downloads that you can find and one of them is GuildFTP.

The following set of screen shots will help you configure the FTP on your machine. 

Say you have downloaded and ran the exe file. Now some configuration changes should get your FTP server up and running for your XI scenarios.

Step 1: Create a User

 

Provide a user name and password. You will be using this in your adapter configurations. Note: Make your user an administrator

Step 2: ADD/EDIT Path

And check all the attributes. This gives your FTP folder complete access to read, write etc.

(An answer to one of the questions concerning 'Unable to write a file - Receiver File Adapter')

and thats it ... you are done !!!!  Now one thing you might have noted is two terms Local Path and Virtual path and here lies one of the secrets of your File adapter configuration.

Even though in your local machine you have the folder name as ftproot and the path say C:\ftproot, in your file adapter you will refer the same as / . So if you have created subfolders like input and output, in the adapter configuration it would be refered to as /input or /output and not C:\ftproot\input or C:\ftproot\output.   This solves the problem of another question "No such directory or folder exists"