In some cases it is desirable to configure a watched folder so that it will accept a folder containing multiple input files and have the multiple output files saved to a folder by the same name as the incoming folder. For example, the requirement may be to convert documents using PDF Generator whereby you want to provide a series of related or “packaged” files for conversion and you need the results for a given transaction or “package” to be written to a similarly named result folder. The thing that has tripped up some customers is how to generate a result folder by the same name as the input folder.
The real trick to getting a folder name replicated in the result directory is to add “%F\” in the Output value for the watched folder settings (the startpoint created in Workbench). Attached is a very simple process that demonstrates a watched folder startpoint that takes in a list variable and passes back out another list variable.
ListOutput4WatchedFolder_process(zip file)
You should be able to run this sample by importing the process in Workbench, adding the process to an “Application” and then deploying it. This should generate the actual watched folder and you can copy a folder that contains any number of files into the “input” folder. It should create a folder by the same name as the input folder in the result location. From there you can insert any document processing you like into the process to do the real document manipulation that LiveCycle excels at.
Configuring a watched folder to handle multiple input files and write results to a single folder,
These kind of workflows don’t scale. Give me one production use case where a Watched folder is deployed.
Please don’t fool people.
Suvrat, I work directly with multiple customers who use watched folders in production environments. This article is in response to one such customers challenge with configuring a watched folder for a specific use case. I’m not sure what scalability issues you have encountered but there definitely are situations where the watched folder configuration needs to be tuned and sometimes requires some trial&error to get it right. You also want to make sure that the watched folder is setup on a high performing disk. I’ve seen where remote NAS devices have been used to host watched folders but the device was not designed for rapid I/O but rather long-term archiving and this impacted the performance. The watched folder settings to tune are discussed here –> http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/10.0/AdminHelp/WS92d06802c76abadb-5145d5d12905ce07e7-7efc.html
Justin,
can you point to some blog/doc on how to configure watch folder in a clustered environment?
should the input folder be on a shared location? will both the nodes that poll on input folder work in a co-operative way?
Cluster configuration of watched folders is a little outside the scope of this article but you can find information on how a watched folders works in a cluster here (ES3 link): http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/10.0/AdminHelp/WS92d06802c76abadb-5145d5d12905ce07e7-7ec1.html
Also, information on how to create the watched folder location is found here: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/10.0/AdminHelp/WS92d06802c76abadb1c01fa7512905cdf2c9-7fed.html
Lastly, we have documentation on how specific services should be configured when invoked from a watched folder: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/10.0/AdminHelp/WS92d06802c76abadb-5145d5d12905ce07e7-7ec1.html