File Connector Guide

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File Location Properties

The following table describes file location properties available for each event source.

When you use regular expressions to define filters to include and exclude files, you can use a tool like the one available at https://regex101.com/ to ensure that the expression syntax is correct and to learn more about Java-style regular expressions.

Property	Description
Directory	Required. Specify the relative path of the directory to monitor. For example: data/docs The question mark (?) is a prohibited character in this field.
Recursive	Determines whether the event source looks for files in all the subdirectories of the specified Directory. Use care with this option. For example, if you move processed files into a subdirectory, those files would be monitored again. This could cause unintended results, including a loop that creates a series of nested directories. The connector ignores any directory name that begins with a period (".") character (for example, ".done"). You can use this as a prefix when you want to skip all files in a particular directory. The best practice is to use this method to store processed files in a subdirectory and avoid issues with recursion.
Include Files	Optional. Enter a regular expression to select files that should be processed. Use a Java-style regular expression. For example, to select only files with the .txt file extension, the regular expression would be similar to: .*\.txt It uses a back slash instead of a forward slash.
Exclude Files	Optional. Enter a regular expression you can enter to select files that should be excluded. Use a Java-style regular expression.