Using Boomi Connectors Efficiently Part 1

The Disk Connector

So I have used the Disk connector many times to log what is being processed. It works well from a QA point of view to ensure items being processed are done as expected.  

But there is a problem when you write files out. You can be pointing to the same disk drive, but you want to put in specific directories to write.

Viewing the picture below for the Disk Connection, you can see it is pointed to the root writing directory called :  D:\Data

Then there is the target file name listed in the operations artifact. See picture below:

This operation shows the file writing directly to the Data directory assigning the filename of JHFoster850.txt.  While this works great, and is easy to use…. I wanted to be able to assign a particular file to a given subdirectory.  At first I connected that the only way to do this would be to use multiple disk Connections.  This would be problematic as it would cause the number of licensed connections to increase for each individual directory.

But wait, there is a way around this. Instead of coding just the file name in the File Filter setting like the first picture, we can actually place the rest of the directory folder names in the form, and field will be structured like the second picture .

SO the new operations screen will look like this:

One step further which can make this even more dynamic is to use a Process property like the picture below:

Using a process property, you can even go one step further and build this string using dynamic process properties.

The Disk read connection is very similar. For this you have two properties you can work with that allow you to point directly to an instance of a file.

1.      The directory process property

2.      The file process property

These are fairly implicit on how to use them.

I hope you can benefit from putting these ideas to work for you. Watch for more.