Processing wire formatted flat files
It is becoming common to either fetch files by ftp that are in a standard wire format (IPTC / ANPA / IIM etc) or have them delivered to you as flat files. If this is the case you need to be able to deliver them to one of Wire, Vwire, Zwire etc to have the data parsed ….These programs normally expect to receive data on a port, so the idea is that we lift the data files of the disc and “print” them to a local data port, which the wire program is “listening” to.
Parsing wire formatted flat files
FTPGET -> FTPSEND
ftp-in to ftp-out : Getting a file by ftp in order to ftp it straight on to another site.
This copy flow was used in a large group where there was internal access to a number of pdf generators, and external access from one delivery machine. The delivery machine had to ftp ‘get’ to the various internal machines, and then simply passed the files on to be ftp’d to an external machine.
IptimerFtp
Using iptimer to achieve the same copy flow. This is good when a) you have a large number of sites to fetch from, or when they are changing constantly. This can also be managed from a web front end.
iptimer to get ftp files at regular intervals
Email HTML files or attachments
… convert text to HTML and email it as a ‘pretty’ email.
Take a jpeg, encode it and mail it as an attachment.
* [[Ipsmtp Attachments Outbound]] – how to generate emails with attachments or as html