Your product seems to assume that with a file based extract that the file pre-exists a nd possibly quite rightly leaves the collection of the file in the first plaxe to something else.
But I was wondering if you had considered an optional extra module that could provide a comms gateway of sorts providing the ability to collect the file to be collected from a mailbox or perhaps even streaming data from a webservice resulting in a physical file that EM could then consume.
There are of course much larger solutions such as SSIS that can do this plus the ETL. But whilst I am still in ‘tyre kicking stage’ I am very impressed with the intuitive interface and approach that you have created. Having said this the missing link for me is the collection from these other types of platforms without the need to create a separate set of scripts or indeed an entire comms management platform.
In our case we have partners who want us to be the FTP client or anoher who needs us to be the FTP server. Then others send us data as file attachments and thenother more advanced ones who have a webservice from which we can collext data. All of these can be scripted using CLI tools which i am comfortable with but it would be good to shed these scripts as well in favour of a more central and intuitive platform like EM.
we will definitely be expanding the data collection options in EasyMorph and we have a lot of things for this on our roadmap. Not all of them will be available in the desktop EasyMorph. We will be launching EasyMorph Server soon and it’s very likely that features like email attachment collection will be implemented with the help of EasyMorph Server (but not in version 1.0). The desktop editions will eventually get dedicated transformations for downloading files and REST requests in general. As for FTP transfers, it’s less of a priority since there exists a great variety of FTP utilities, so replicating this functionality in EasyMorph would be nice, but not that critical. We at EasyMorph internally use WinSCP in the command line mode and it works like a charm.
The right way of using external tools like WinSCP in EasyMorph is to wrap them into a re-usable, parameterized EasyMorph project where the external tool is executed using Run Program transformation which command line is composed using the project’s parameters [1]. You design such re-usable project once, and then call it from other projects whenever you need it using Call transformation (requires Professional edition). URLs, file names and locations are specified using the project’s parameters. This basically allows creating custom transformations. Eventually, such helper projects grow up into a library of re-usable projects for various cases – FTP uploads, file copying/renaming, file downloads, curl requests, file conversion and whatnot. And when you need it scheduled – there is EasyMorph Scheduler that allows specifying project parameters as well. The biggest downside of this approach is that such re-usable projects have limited portability since locations of external tools are usually specified using absolute paths.
So answering your question – yes, built-in connectivity options are not so numerous at this point and will be expanded eventually. However, EasyMorph already provides a mechanism to natively plug 3rd party utilities into EasyMorph in a reusable fashion.
Since version 3.9 EasyMorph has dedicated actions to receive/send emails with attachments (supported IMAP/Exchange), perform bi-directional SFTP/SCP file transfer and FTP/FTPS downloads. Download the latest version from our web-site.