Integrating Secure FTP into Data Services

SAP Data Services includes decently robust native support for FTP transport, as long as you don’t mind it being non-secured. However, understandably, many applications require the use of secured FTP transport methodologies, since the data being transmitted is often of a sensitive nature. You probably don’t want to risk your data being intercepted in transit, especially if its going outside of the organization’s firewall. Fortunately, programs like WinSCP are available, and are robust, scriptable, and free. We can then integrate the scripting into Data Services to create a relatively seamless solution.

What You’ll Need: 

• WinSCP (available at winscp.net)
• Data Services
• A text editor
• FTP credentials and protocol information
• Known directory structures on both source and target systems
• A little bit of time

In this example, we’ll copy over a remote directory’s contents to a local directory.

Step 1: Install WinSCP
Download WinSCP at windscp.net. You can run a pretty standard install.

• Make a note of the installation directory
• Set the program to use .ini configuration, instead of the default, which is to write configuration to the registry. I’ll explain why (and how to fix it if you already goofed) below.

Step 2: Make Sure You’re Using .ini Configuration
WinSCP stores remote server keys in its configuration area. Generally, the first time you connect to a remote server, you need to accept the remote key. After this, it’s stored in that area for any future uses. Since we want all of this scripted, we want to make sure there is no user input required. If there is, the entire process will fail, since Data Services will interpret the prompt as an execution failure.

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About Britton Gray
Britton has been working in software development and Business Intelligence for the past fourteen years, and has been working with SAP BusinessObjects reporting, analytics, and information management tools for six years. He is certified in Data Integrator and Web Intelligence, and enjoys developing end-to-end BI solutions that enable customers to gain new insights into their data.