Most PeopleSoft support groups find themselves dealing with FTP
commands to move interface files to or from other locations.
Common approaches include using the PeopleCode FTP functions
and/or creating a shared SQC to handle FTP transfers.
Here are a couple of other ways of looking at the problem.
At http://www.agentbob.info/agentbob/PeopleSoft/FTPProcess.html,
Agent Bob (Jochen Seifarth) walks us through setting up FTP transfers as processes
that can be included in a Process Scheduler job. This is
referenced in a PeopleSoft Fans post at
http://peoplesoftfans.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8842,
which also shows the usual way of calling a .BAT file or Unix shell script
from SQR. It also includes a discussion of how one shop used Java
to handle FTP.
David L. Price's blog at http://ideatec.blogspot.com
discusses using FTP in PeopleCode. (It's not the post at the top—scroll
down a little.) What is especially interesting about this method
is that he is calling FTP functionality from a DLL instead of using
the PeopleCode attachment functions. (He's using App Engine as a shell
for PeopleCode; I definitely like his comment that "I still hate writing
App Engine programs the 'PeopleSoft recommended' way.")
While you're there, scroll down to
see some other interesting posts.
Do -NOT- name your variables this way...
Here's an amusing little item that a debugger
user accidentally ran into the
other day. This could be added to the SQR variable oddities
discussion. If you create an SQR variable with a name that includes the string "-NOT",
you will probably (but not always) see compile errors. This sequence of
characters will cause problems in IF, COND, and the right (but not left) side
of LET, but not in DISPLAY or SHOW. For example, $DEPARTMENT-NOT-IN-LIST would
be rejected. I still haven't figured out what SQR thinks -NOT signifies when
it's part of a variable name. There could be more like this—just one more
reason to avoid hyphens (-) and stick to underscores (_) in variable names.