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Hi, I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge with sending files using ftp to Cloverleaf? We are looking to get a file from our inventory system onto our AIX box and somehow using a cronjob to ftp this file to a thread on our engine to process it into an HL7 message and send to another system. Any ideas, suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!
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Nicole Goodyear wrote:
Hi,
I was wondering if anyone has any knowledge with sending files using ftp to Cloverleaf? We are looking to get a file from our inventory system onto our AIX box and somehow using a cronjob to ftp this file to a thread on our engine to process it into an HL7 message and send to another system. Any ideas, suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated!
You would need to setup an ftp service on your Cloverleaf server, it wouldn’t have anything to do with the cloverleaf application. After its been FTP’d to your Cloverleaf server, then a thread could read it from that directory.
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Hi Nicole – An alternative to “pushing” the files to your AIX/Cloverleaf host via ftp would be to “pull” the files from the source system into an AIX directory for subsequent Cloverleaf processing (if needed).
If the source file resides on a host running ftp server, you can use ftp to ‘get’ the files from the source. Also handy is the samba client, smbclient, available for AIX, which will allow you to ‘get’ files from Windows-based systems using ftp-style commands.
smbclient is especially useful if your source host is a Windows PC that is not running ftp server. Having control of the transfers residing on the AIX box enables you to easily script and automate the transfer process.
– Glenn
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I like to do what Glen suggested and pull the files across via FTP/get. You could use the FTP protocol built in the engine and have cron start the Cloverleaf process and/or threads.
I typically use a k-shell script invoked by cron to do FTP/gets.
The same k-shell scripting concept is also applicable to OpenSSH SFTP/gets.
My entire FTP/get script might have a distracting amount of other bells and whistles so here is a k-shell code snippet to illustrate just the FTP/get part
Code:ftp -inv <<- ! >> $local_ftp_log_file
open $host_name
user $user_id $pass_word
$transfer_mode
cd $remote_dir
pwd
dir
lcd $local_dir
mget $remote_file
bye
!Once you have determined the file(s) have been pulled across successfully then you mihgt want to do an FTP/delete to clear them off the source system, so here is an example of that k-shell code snippet
Code:ftp -inv <<- ! >> $local_ftp_log_file
open $host_name
user $user_id $pass_word
cd $remote_dir
pwd
dir
mdelete $remote_file
pwd
dir
bye
!I warn you against assuming FTP is fool proof and advise you put methods in place to make sure your files are delivered and not lost or truncated.
The simplest way is to check for a trailer record in the file that at least tells you how many records are in the file and confirm they match.
Since people often hand edit FTP files, I even do some basic data validation of the files when possible.
Given my preference, I would have the source system create a companion check sum file that would be used to make sure the file was complete and had not been tampered with.
Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com
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