Download and process file via FTP

[benstephenson]

I’m a new user and am really struggling to get my head round what I think should be a simple use case.

I want to download a file from an FTP server, manipulate it a bit, then upload it to a different file server.

I added an FTP Connector node, which was able to connect, but I can’t then find another node which takes the pale blue “FTP Connection” as an input. So how do I download a file?

I worked round this by using the legacy “FTP Connection” and then a “Download” node. These got the file downloaded. But then I can’t pass that in to the CSV reader, because that node doesn’t take an input.
So i’ve ended up with two disconnected flows which have to be run one after the other, which just feels wrong.

If I put my Column Resorter after the Download node, I just get one row which is the URL and a column called downloaded.

So a few questions I suppose:

• what node do i put after an FTP Connector to allow me to download a file?
• how do I then read this file in to a CSV Reader so I can start manipulating it?

Thanks

[benstephenson]

Also - the file it downloads is a .gz file. The CSV Reader seems able to read this without needing it to be unzipped, which is great, but I’m stuck on how to pass the file into this node as it doesn’t have an input.

[ScottF]

Hi @benstephenson and welcome to the forum.

I think what you want here is to enable dynamic ports on the CSV Reader and Writer nodes. You can do this by clicking on the three dots in the bottom corner. Something like this:

(EDIT: replaced figure with something that is hopefully closer to what you’re trying to do.)

[benstephenson]

Wow that was easy. Didn’t even notice those three dots.