Using Variables in a GoAnywhere Director Project

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A variable is a name associated with a value. In GoAnywhere Director, a variable can hold a variety of values including numbers, file and folder names, IP addresses and more. You can pass in the values for variables from your applications or from other projects.

Using a Variable to override a File Name

A project outline is shown below which connects to a SFTP server and puts a file onto that server. See Figures 1 & 2.

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Notice how the Source File is hard coded with the file name of C:/temp/gademo.txt. This is not flexible if your file names change regularly.

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Instead of using a hard-coded value, you can use a variable in the SFTP PUT task to supply the file name. To do this, right-click on the Project Level in the Outline and select “Add a Variable.” Give the variable a name, “MyFile” and leave the initial value blank (See Figures 3 & 4).

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Your project outline now has the variable MyFile added.

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You now need to add this variable to the PUT task Source File field. Variable names are wrapped with ${} when they are used as an input attribute in a task (See Figure 6).

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With this change, you can now run the project and pass the name of the file you want to transfer.
Passing parameters can be done several ways:

1. Interactively
2. From another Project
3. From a Monitor Job
4. From a Scheduled Job
5. From a GoAnywhere Services Trigger
6. From an External application using the GACmd API

For this example, we will execute this project interactively and use our variable to pass the file path and name. Click on the “More Actions” button next to the project name, and then click the “Execute Advanced…” option (see Figure 7).

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This allows you to pass a value to the variable defined earlier within the project (see Figure 8).

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By filling in the File Path and Name, then clicking on the “Execute Interactively” button, you can then view the job log to see where ${MyFile} is created and set to the value “C:\Temp\GADemo2.txt.” You can also see that the file has been uploaded successfully (see Figure 9).

Figure 9

The Source for this project is located below.
 

Code: Select all

<project name="Using Variables - Part 2" mainModule="Main" version="2.0" logLevel="verbose">
<variable name="MyFile" value="" />

	<module name="Main">

		<sftp label="Connect to Server" resourceId="Test SFTP" version="1.0">
			<put label="Put file on Target Server" 
sourceFile="${MyFile}" 
destinationDir="/Demos/inbound" />
		</sftp>

	</module>

	<description>Basic Project with Parameter</description>
	
</project>

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