Thanks @Vikash Sharma and @Martin Wroblinski for the feedback. (Martin: to clarify, I am using wM MFT (SaaS) and not wM Active Transfer. If I look in the wM MFT documentation it does not provide much info related to what I'm trying to do.
Let me clarify what I'm trying to do:
- We have a cloud based app that can injest events and display them in an app to give visibiliy into file transfers. This app can accept events via HTTPS POST or Kafka. When the app receives the event it will slice and dice it and render it in the dashboard. Almost like an end-to-end visibility for wM MFT actions so that users can track what's going on with each file transfer.
- To do this, I'm thinking I can insert the task step webMethods.io Integration FlowService within my Post processing or Scheduled Actions.
Then in the wM Integration FlowService I can map the metadata received from wM MFT, into our application's event format (payload) and then send it using HTTPS POST (or Kafka). Event payload examples are shown below.
Note: I do not need the actual file passed to the FlowService. I only want to take metadata that is available in wM MFT during the file transfer (which means when each Action executes).
My understanding is that I can define an input signature in my FlowService then it will be available when I select it in my Task step.
But, I still need the following answered:
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Is there a list of wM MFT metadata variables available while the Action executes, that I can pass in my defined input variables?
- How do I assign values to my input variables in the Action?
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Is there a predefined signature (similar to how wM B2B uses Flow Services) or does the input depend on what I define in my FlowService ?
Below are the event payloads that our file transfer visibility app can ingest:
The biggest question is: is the data available in wM MFT to be passed into my FlowService, so that I can map it into our applications event format? The application can ingest a lot of information (as you can see below), so this solution will only work if I can pass the metadata from wM MFT.
If you have any of these answers please share. I'm asking IBM wM MFT team but they have not answered me yet.
I require this info to complete architecture diagrams and documentation on integrating wM MFT to our file transfer visibility app.
New info !!! - after posting the above: I ended up finding a list of system variables available here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/wm-mft?topic=actions-server-variables
- I then defined the system variables as input fields to my flow service. I put all variables within document structures to organize them. For example, here are some of the General fields:
and then when wM MFT introspects my Flow Service, it shows me the fields, and I can use the actual system variable name (wrapped in curly brackets) to set the values before calling the FlowService. Here are some of the General system variables (notice how they are initialized?)
- I added a Find task step and connected to my SFTP server to access the files. It found 24 files, so what happened is the Flow Service got executed 24 times. I'm not sure if this is controllable. In my use case I don't really want to execute the Flow Service for each file. I just want to be able to pass wM MFT metadata into the Flow Service, so I can pass it along to my file transfer tracking app. The tracking app tracks the progress of the end to end file transfer, so I don't need to send an event per file. I need to send events to tell the file tracker app the various stages of progress. For example, Transfer started, File being processed, file delivered, transfer complete (you get the idea).
So I need more find grained event calls to my FlowService.
This is where I'm at. I have some more knowledge than I did earlier but I'm not sure a) if I have enough system variables (metadata) to send to my file tracking app 2) if I can change the behavior so that the Flow Service is not called for each file.
As you can tell I have not used wM MFT very much, so if you have any ideas on this please let me know.
Wayne