FTP Task

The FTP task allows you to receive or send files over the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). In SQL Server 2000, you could only receive files through FTP. In SSIS, this has been drastically improved. You can now receive, send, and delete local or remote files. You can also create and delete remote and local directories.

The General page in the FTP Task Editor is where you specify which FTP Connection Manager contains your FTP site information. If you haven't specified one yet, select New Connection under the FTPConnection option. This will open the FTP Connection Manager option. It's quite a bit different from the OLE DB Connection Managers you've been using up to this point, as you can see in Figure 3-9. The Server Name option contains the FTP address for where you'd like to connect. The default port for most FTP sites is 21. The other important option to note here is the Use Passive Mode option. You may have to select this option if the server you're connecting to is only configured to communicate passively. This was a constant issue in SQL Server 2000 since it didn't have this option.

Figure 3-9

Once you have the FTP connection configured, there are some notable options in the File Transfer page (as shown in Figure 3-10). The options here are almost identical to the options in the File System task. The IsRemotePathVariable and IsLocalPathVariable options allow the paths to be set to a variable. The RemotePath option sets what directory or files on the remote FTP system you want to perform the action on. The LocalPath option is the Connection Manager that contains a directory on the SSIS side that is going to receive or send the files via FTP. The OverwriteFileAtDestination option sets whether the file at the destination will be overwritten if a conflict exists. Like many FTP clients, you can set the files to be transported using ASCII format by setting the IsTransferAscii option to true. The most important option, of course, is the Operation option, which selects what type of action you'd like to perform.

Figure 3-10