SAP SFTP Adapter: A Quick Walkthrough

[Shabarish_Nair]

Many of us are now aware that SAP has released B2B and SFTP/PGP capabilities for SAP PI. Earlier, we had to depend upon third party vendors for this service but with SAP filling this gap, I strongly believe that PI is now in a better position to be provisioned and a true enterprise service bus.

I am one of those who have been waiting for a long time to see this as a standard feature from SAP and so I didnt lose any time to get myself to test the SFTP adapter :smile:

In this blog, I will try to walk you through the usage of the SAP SFTP adapter and some of the configuration parameters.

Lets go through the Sender SFTP adapter configurations in detail;

The two important parameters that you see above is the Server Fingerprint and Proxy. Since I am not using a proxy based connectivity, I have chosen No Proxy as the value. Now the question is how do we know what is the Server Fingerprint? One option might be to ask the SFTP server admin for that info but then an easier option might be to use a client like CoreFTP. Provide the server host, user and pwd and try to login via the client. You will then be prompted by a Pop Up as below and you should be able to get the required info :smile:

An interesting feature I have found in the SFTP adapter is the usage of regular expressions. For example, in the below screenshot you will see that I have used a pattern for the file name. This means that the adapter will process only files which starts with a digit. ex 0abc.txt, 6test.pdf etc. I really hope SAP will extend this feature to the standard File adapter also.

Another brilliant option is for checking duplicate files. This too needs to be added as a feature to the Standard File adapter as it is a very helpful option.

The result when I try to process the same file again if the option is checked is as below;

Apart from this the adapter also supports Archiving of the files and most importantly the ASMA properties.

Note: Additionally, the SFTP adapter also support private key based authentication. The SFTP server I have is not configured for such a test hence I was unable to run that scenario.

Note: The Receiver SFTP adapter is quite similar in terms of the configuration esp. around the server fingerprint etc and most of the other features are self explanatory.

Any Drawbacks? 

Well Hell yeah. Whatever happened to File Content Conversion? I was hoping that as we have it in the File adapter, it would have been a standard feature for using File content conversion as part of the adapter configuration. But apparently SAP has left that feature out (Why would the do that?). So this will mean that we will have to rely on the MessageTransformBean for such requirements.