FTP integrations with interesting behaviors

Now we have looked at how to use the FTP connector with the use of mapping capabilities. However, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, things are a bit different when we do not use mapping capabilities. In the following section, we will look at these scenarios.

Using FTP without a schema mapping in Orchestration

To understand what happens without mapping, we need to understand a bit more about how the connector has been created. The connector builds upon a Java standard called the Java Connector Architecture (JCA). When we use the mapping feature, the JCA connector is extended with additional intelligence to handle the schema definition and mapping. However, without this, ICS uses the basic File/FTP implementation of JCA.

The JCA implementation does not work with normal string types, but uses a data type called Base64. As files could be binary in nature (from executables to images), as well as textual, a consistent framework is needed...