With immediate effect, Optitask source code (in C#) will be available for purchase with the product.
FTP’s been around for nearly 40 years and I don’t foresee that it would disappear any time soon. Thousands of organizations are still using FTP on a daily basis for a variety of tasks including offsite backups, file sharing and B2B integrations.
Optitask is a great tool to use if you need automated FTP operations in your business.
Let me show you how to automate a simple FTP process. I have a web site with a Microsoft SQL Express database that I want to download on a daily basis to my local computer for backup purposes.
The first step is to create a new task for the backup:
Next, I’ll use a FTP Connect component as the first action in my task to establish a connection with the FTP Server. On the settings page of the FTP Connect component I specify the connection settings to my FTP server:
Screen Notes: I’ve selected the FTP server type of FTP. Optitask currently supports standard FTP, FTPS and FTP over SSL. SFTP will also be added in the next release. You’ll notice that I also specified the default remote directory after the connection is established.
In the Advanced Settings page for the connection component I’ll update the Connection and Read Timeouts to bigger values since I know my connection to the server is slow and timeouts are inevitable:
Next, we’ll add a FTP Download action that will download our files from the FTP server:
Screen Notes: You’ll see from the screenshot above I’ve selected the FTP Connection we just created. This is because Optitask allows you to use multiple FTP sessions in the same task at once. I also selected the “Multiple files matching pattern” that will download all the files matching my search pattern automatically.
After the files are downloaded, we need to disconnect from the FTP server and we do this by adding a FTP Disconnect action below our download action:
The last step is to setup a schedule for our task. We’ll add a schedule trigger to the task and specify the settings to execute our backup task every night at 12AM:
That’s it. Four simple steps to automate file transfers from a FTP server.
Click here to learn how to Setup up a Network Monitor with Optitask
I appologize for all the links to my previous Optitask blog but I don’t really want to move the content to the new official blog so please bare with me. My old blog at Ernic is still active but is primarily my personal and contracting blog.
Read the full article on how to Schedule a SQL Query or Stored Procedure to execute at scheduled times.
Create a new task and add a new “SQL Task” action. Right-click on the new task, select properties and then click on the settings page.
You need to specify a database connection to use, if you don’t have one use the data source manager to create a new connection to the database server.
To perform the backup enter the following SQL command:This will perform a backup of the “Northwind” database and create the output database to ‘C:\NorthwindSQLBackup.bak’.
BACKUP DATABASE Northwind TO DISK = 'C:\NorthwindSQLBackup.bak'
One additional setting you will need is the Command Timeout. In this example I’ve set the timeout to 3600 seconds (1 hour), otherwise the command will timeout before the SQL backup is completed.
I wrote an article a while back on my personal blog about: “How to send a SMS message or Email automatically when SharePoint list is updated. This is very handy when you need to notify users when a document was added or updated in a document library amongst other things.
Here’s the link to the article explaining the steps involved:
Automatically send SMS messages when a Sharepoint List is updated
Developers and IT administrators are often faced with the task to schedule a program, a stored procedure or a component perform cleanup operations, batch processing and other tasks that need to happen on a scheduled basis.
The quick and easy way out is to schedule it on your database software if it supports it or to run it from the Windows Scheduler. The problem with this is that when the job fails you have no control or knowledge of it or if an existing program is running, there is no way to prevent new instances from starting up.
With Optitask is simple to schedule anything from stored procedures, programs or even custom build .NET, COM or DLL components to execute at scheduled times and have full control.
Watch the demonstration video below to see how easy it is to schedule and execute:
- A method call on a custom build .NET component
- A custom build program
- A stored procedure on a database
There’s something about Optitask that excites me every time I fire it up. I am not sure what it is but this product makes me feel fulfilled. Could it be because I built it, or perhaps because it reminds me of my childhood playing with LEGO? Similar to LEGO, Optitask is a platform with hundreds of different actions or pieces of LEGO that fit together, and, placed in the right order can achieve great things!
Hello and welcome to the first post of our company blog. I am very excited to start this blog and hope to post regularly news about Optitask plus tutorials on how to use Optitask in your workplace. If you have any suggestions on the type of content you expect here, drop me an email at erhard@ernicsoftware.com.