In Iguana 4.1, the From File source component for a channel and the To File destination component have been significantly upgraded.

File indexes can be specified for the To File destination component

If you are using an integer index or a padded integer index as the unique identifier for files written by the To File destination component of a channel, you can now set the index for the next file to be written.

Iguana 4.0 always set the next file index to the first available index. Iguana 3.3 kept track of the indexes used and selected a unique index for each file written.

Minimum file age feature added to From File component

The From File component now includes the option to specify a minimum file age:

This enables the channel to ignore input files that are still being written to.

Format specifiers can be included in a To File destination component file name

If you have specified To File as the destination component for your channel, and you are writing all output messages to a single file, you can supply one or more format specifiers as part of the file name.

These format specifiers define the name of the file and indicate how often a new copy of the file is to be created. For example, if you include the %d format specifier as part of the file name, a new copy of the file is created every day.

If you create a separate file for each message, you can use format specifiers to create a custom ID for your file names.

For more information on format specifiers, see Using Format Specifiers in File Names. For more information on custom IDs, see To File.

Many From File and To File operations are now performed on separate threads

In previous versions of Iguana, when a From File source component obtained a message from a file, or a To File destination component stored a message in a file, other Iguana server operations could not be performed until this task had been completed. This meant that system performance was adversely affected when the component was interacting with a slow file system. (Examples of slow file systems include remote systems and directories containing large numbers of files.)

In Iguana 4.1, many of these file input and output operations are now performed independently (in separate threads). This greatly improves the performance of the file components in Iguana 4.1.

Encoding can now be specified for messages to and from files and LLP connections

You can now specify the encoding that is used by messages that are received by the From File and LLP Listener source components, or that is used for messages that are sent to the To File and LLP Client destination components. To specify the encoding, select the encoding from the list box provided: