Dispatcher Introduction

You navigate to the Add/Edit Profile window by selecting the Edit button at the top of the Profile Setup tab on the main window of the Dispatcher.

Figure 1 - The Profile Setup tab allows the user to enter data for the profile in general, its name and description, file pattern and poll rate to monitor the source.

In the above image the File Pattern is a Regular Expression.  For .*\.xml the first period (.) refers to any character and the following asterisk (*) says to repeat the last thing, in this case - any character. The last part starts with a back slash (\), in this case it says the next character, a period, is really a period and not any character. The xml text is taken as a literal.  So, what do we have; accept any file that has any number of characters and ends with a ".XML".  Here is an online reference if you rally what to dig into this.

Figure 2 - Source Setup Tab: You can select the type of file source  by changing
the "Select a source type" combo box selection.

In the above screen shot you can see how you can setup your own decoding of the date in the source file. However, the system also has built in formats that can be used by leaving the field blank.  The following is an outline of those formats:

//Minutely
// 0123456789111111111
//           012345678
// 20100218_16_42.xml
// YYYYMMDD_HH_NN

//Hourly
// 0123456789111111111
//           012345678
// 20100218_16.xml
// YYYYMMDD_HH.xml

//Daily
// 0123456789111111111
//           012345678
// 20100218.xml
// YYYYMMDD.xml

The above formating will only be used if the file name is all numbers.  If you have a file name that is characters like Myfile.CSV then the Dispatcher will not try to evaluate the date in the file name at all. 

What this gives the user is the ability to process files in time sequence. The first file created gets processed first.

Figure 3 - Target Setup Tab: As with the source setup you can select the type
of file handling by changing the "Select a target type" combo box selection.