The FTP Component enables you to perform FTP or secure FTP (SFTP / FTPS) operations, specifically reading a file into a variable (based on a full filename or the first file in a path matching a wildcard), writing a file to a variable, deleting a file or wildcard pattern, renaming a file, or returning a list of files in a folder matching a wildcard pattern for subsequent enumeration.  Messages can be processed synchronously by waiting for the component to finish blocking on receipt of a message, or asynchronously by handling the OnReceiveMessage event.

On the first page of the configuration interface, you must select a +FTP connection - this is a customized connection manager enabling you to specify advanced FTP properties.



If you drop down the connection combo, you can select <New Connection>, and the +FTP Connection Configuration form appears.



This form offers a comoprehensive range of properties allowing you to fully configure your FTP connection.  You must at least select enter information for the Protocol, Server address, User Name, Password and Server Directory fields.

The second page of the configuration interface allows you to select an action, and the associated parameters. You can read, write, delete and enumerate files, and enumerate folders. The dropdown indicate where you can select a variable to provide the value.



If you select the 'Delete file when transaction scope commits' option, valid only for Get operations, any file retrieved will be automatically deleted at the end of the current transaction scope (or after successful retrieval of the file content into the specified variable, if there is no current transaction).  You can also specify 'Search sub-folders' for Get operations to to look for files both in the specified folder and sub-folders.

The Timeouts tab enables you to configure how long your component will wait to pick up a file, and is only applicable to Read File mode when there is initially no matching file to pick up. There are two modes of operation - synchronous and asynchronous.  In synchronous mode the task effectively blocks until a file is received, whereupon it completes and linked tasks can execute.  In asynchronous mode you would typically handle the OnReceiveMessage event exposed by the component to handle messages as they arrive.  This event has no parameters, as the received message is already bound to a variable.



The Delay between poll attempts field allows you to configure the number of seconds between successive checks on the messaging database to determine if any matching messages have arrived.  The Get timeout field is the total number of seconds for the component to wait for a message to arrive before giving up.  The Fail task on Get timeout option allows you to determine if such a state should trigger a failure of the component.  Otherwise you can check if a file was retrieved by checking the Message variable (which will have empty content if no message was retrieved) or using the ExecValueVariable result.

0 and -1 are special cases for Get timeout, relating to a zero or infinite timeout respectively.  In the case of a zero timeout, this means that the component will not wait if there is no message waiting in the messaging database.

The Commands tab allows you to supply custom native FTP commands to execute at certain times.  This can be very useful in specific scenarios, but in normal use you would not generally need to do this.



Finally, the Logging tab provides information on how to configure an FTP log file.



Note that you can also execute this task within a Foreach Loop Container task, to execute the contained tasks once for every file retrieved. Simply select 'BlueSSIS +FTP File Enumerator' as the Enumerator, then click the 'Configure...' button to configure the properties.



BlueSSIS provides a number of enumerators, mostly mapping to associated data retrieval tasks, but also including an Infinite Loop enumerator (useful for manual polling scenarios).