FTP Task

The FTP task downloads and uploads data files and manages directories on servers. For example, a package can download data files from a remote server or an Internet location as part of an Integration Services package workflow. You can use the FTP task for the following purposes:

• Copying directories and data files from one directory to another, before or after moving data, and applying transformations to the data.

• Logging in to a source FTP location and copying files or packages to a destination directory.

• Downloading files from an FTP location and applying transformations to column data before loading the data into a database.

At run time, the FTP task connects to a server by using an FTP connection manager. The FTP connection manager is configured separately from the FTP task, and then is referenced in the FTP task. The FTP connection manager includes the server settings, the credentials for accessing the FTP server, and options such as the time-out and the number of retries for connecting to the server. For more information, see FTP Connection Manager.

When accessing a local file or a local directory, the FTP task uses a File connection manager or path information stored in a variable. In contrast, when accessing a remote file or a remote directory, the FTP task uses a directly specified path on the remote server, as specified in the FTP connection manager, or path information stored in a variable. For more information, see File Connection Manager and Integration Services Variables.

This means that the FTP task can receive multiple files and delete multiple remote files; but the task can send only one file and delete only one local file if it uses a connection manager, because a File connection manager can access only one file. To access multiple local files, the FTP task must use a variable to provide the path information. For example, a variable that contains "C:\Test\*.txt" provides a path that supports deleting or sending all the files that have a .txt extension in the Test directory.

To send multiple files and access multiple local files and directories, you can also execute the FTP task multiple times by including the task in a Foreach Loop. The Foreach Loop can enumerate across files in a directory using the For Each File enumerator. For more information, see Foreach Loop Container.

The FTP task supports the ? and * wildcard characters in paths. This lets the task access multiple files. However, you can use wildcard characters only in the part of the path that specifies the file name. For example, C:\MyDirectory\*.txt is a valid path, but C:\*\MyText.txt is not.

The FTP operations can be configured to stop the File System task when the operation fails, or to transfer files in ASCII mode. The operations that send and receive files copy can be configured to overwrite destination files and directories.