Connecting to FTP with SAP CPI

SFTP is a file transfer protocol which has made a vast impact across the globe ensuring an secure transfer of data, but there are quite a few(or slightly more than few) customer who are still depending on FTP rather than SFTP.

SAP CPI doesn’t provide us with any standard method to connect to FTP server, so with quite a bit of research and groovy skills (thanks to SAP CPI, i am turning into a Groovy expert) i was able to connect to FTP server with the below code.

With this Groovy code, you would be able to connect to FTP read the file and store the data in body. As a part of testing, i have tried it on file extensions like txt,csv,bin (majorly txt formats) and not word or excel or pdf format’s.

Things you would need to do :

1. Import the Apache Common Net Jar file in archive
2. Raise a ticket with SAP CPI Operations insisting them to open the port to communicate with your FTP.
   In general FTP port is 21

Groovy Code:

import com.sap.gateway.ip.core.customdev.util.Message;
import java.util.HashMap;
import org.apache.commons.net.ftp.FTPClient
import org.apache.commons.net.ftp.FTPFile

def Message processData(Message message) {
    //Body 
       def body = message.getBody(java.lang.String)as String;
   
    	FTPClient ftpClient = new FTPClient()
	ftpClient.connect('host name');
	ftpClient.login('user name','password');    
		
	//Get ftp body
	ftpClient.enterLocalPassiveMode() ;
	InputStream inputStream = ftpClient.retrieveFileStream(new String('ftp file name'.getBytes("UTF-8"), "iso-8859-1"));
	ByteArrayOutputStream swapStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
	byte[] buff = new byte[100];
	int rc = 0;
	int value =100;
	while ((rc = inputStream.read(buff, 0, value)) > 0) {
	swapStream.write(buff, 0, rc);
	}
	
	body = swapStream.toString();
		
	def messageLog = messageLogFactory.getMessageLog(message);
	messageLog.addAttachmentAsString("log ftp data", body.toString(), "text/plain");
        
        
       return message;
}

Apache Common Net jar : https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-net/download_net.cgi

Hope this helps