Suppressing empty (0 byte) file on File send port...

[Adman]

I pick up a file, run a map on the message, and write the contents do
a different directory.

Sometimes, the map will create an empty message because all the input
rows are filtered out. In this case, a 0 byte file is created.

Is there an easy way to suppress this 0 byte file from being created?
If there isn't an easy way, is there a hard way?

Thanks!
Adman

[Adman]

FWIW, I can get around this by using a temporary dropoff location.
Write the file, and then using a separate Receive Location, pick it
back up again. BizTalk will throw a warning and then ignore 0 byte
files. Still looking for a cleaner solution, though.

Adman

[nbusy]

Hi Adman,

We had similar sort of issue in our environment. In our case, we wanted to
get rid of empty flat-files created as a result of filtering out rows.
First thought was like yours - using temporary folder but I didn't want to
add unnecessary round passing data through BizTalk.
The second was a standalone script removing 0-bytes files.
What I've ended with was a pipeline component to check the resulting message
and return null if we didn't need it. In fact, there already was a pipeline
component I used for custom file naming at run-time based on context
properties and/or message body. I've just made a change to the component to
allow configuration to omit messages I don't want.

Regards,
Nick

[Adman]

> What I've ended with was a pipeline component to check the resulting message
> and return null if we didn't need it. In fact, there already was a pipeline

Thanks Nick. For such a simple little project, I didn't want to do a
custom pipeline component, but it's good to know that is an option.

Thanks for your thoughts!
Adman