File Watcher Trigger

After the scheduler trigger, this is the next most popular trigger: it allows you to setup specific drives, folders, and network paths to be monitored for the existence of new or changed files. This makes it possible to setup a job that responds to files being dropped into a certain location on your network or on a local drive folder.

The first parameter is the Folder Path To Watch. This will be the complete local path like C:\MyFiles, or should be a network UNC path like \\MyServer\ShareName\PathToFiles\PickupFolder. Again, it is important to remember that JobServer.NET must have network permissions to any UNC paths.

The next parameter is the File Pattern. If not specified, it is equivalent to *.*, matching all files in the specified path. The file pattern used here must strictly conform to the simple pattern used in Windows Command Line and such, which only supports the use of the question mark and asterisk for wild card characters (i.e., it is not a regular expression). Therefore, to look only for CSV files in a specified folder, you may use a pattern like *.csv for this parameter.

The Trigger Actions parameter provides some control over the files that are picked up by the file-watcher. For most people, simply clicking the All option is enough and the file-watcher will report back all the files it finds in the path. For a finer degree of control, the additional trigger-actions, Create, Change, Rename and Delete can be used to respond to when those specific events happen to files in the path.

The parameter for Include Subfolders will also search the path for any sub-folders located in it. Normally this defaults to unchecked meaning only the files found directly within that topmost specified folder are found. When the subfolders option is enabled, then any number of subfolders deep will be included while watching for eligible files. The last parameter Include Hidden Files can be enabled (checked) if you want the file-watcher to pick up files that have the hidden attribute set. Normally the file-watcher will ignore any hidden files in the path, but this option allows you to override that behavior.

The trigger also defines an output parameter named FileList. The FileList parameter from this trigger is a list of one or more files that is returned by the file-watcher each time it detects any files matching the input parameters. The list of files is always a fully qualified path to the file and multiple files are formatted as one entry per line.

While the screenshot of the above shows the example in the preceeding steps, this is what a local file path might look like when configuring a new file watcher trigger.