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Flat file connection properties

Defines the properties you need to assign to for a flat file source connection.
The following table describes the flat file connection properties:
Connection Property
Description
Connection Name
A name for the connection. This name must be unique within the organization. Connection names can contain alphanumeric characters, spaces, and the following special characters: _ . + -
Spaces at the beginning or end of the name are trimmed and are not saved as part of the name. Maximum length is 100 characters. Connection names are not case sensitive.
Description
An optional description for the connection. Maximum length is 255 characters.
Use Secret Vault
Stores sensitive credentials for this connection in the secrets manager that is configured for your organization.
This property appears only if secrets manager is set up for your organization.
This property is not supported by Data Ingestion and Replication and the Data Access Management services.
When you enable the secret vault in the connection, you can select which credentials that the Secure Agent retrieves from the secrets manager. If you don't enable this option, the credentials are stored in the repository or on a local Secure Agent, depending on how your organization is configured.
Note: If you’re using this connection to apply data access policies through pushdown or proxy services, you cannot use the Secret Vault configuration option.
For information about how to configure and use a secrets manager, see Secrets manager configuration.
Runtime Environment
Runtime environment that contains the Secure Agent to use for accessing the flat files.
Select a Secure Agent, serverless, or elastic runtime environment.
Ensure the serverless runtime environment contains the mounted EFS or NFS directories which contain the flat files.
For database ingestion and replication tasks, select a Secure Agent. You can't use a Hosted Agent, serverless runtime environment, or elastic runtime environment.
Note: Do not select a runtime environment with Secure Agents that run on NTT. A flat file connection cannot use a Secure Agent that runs on NTT.
Directory
The directory accessible by all Secure Agents in the selected runtime environment where the flat file is stored.
Ensure that the Secure Agent is up and running to fetch the remote directory details.
The directory is the service URL for this connection type.
Enter the full directory or click Browse to locate and select the directory. You can then select a file contained in that directory or in any of its subdirectories when you use the connection.
Note: If you click Browse and receive the error message, "The runtime environment cannot get the requested file system information...," see the Error while clicking Browse on the Flat File connection Knowledge article.
Maximum length is 100 characters. Directory names can contain alphanumeric characters, spaces, and the following special characters:
/ \ : _ ~
You don’t need to specify the flat file name in the connection. You can specify the file name when you create new files in the directory in a mapping task.
In a serverless runtime environment, the directory used for configuring data disks must be one of the mounted directories or their subdirectories.
In an elastic runtime environment, store the flat file in the EFS file system and specify the following directory path:
/etc/infa/pod/<elastic runtime environment ID>/
For more information about uploading flat files in an elastic runtime enviornment, see Uploading flat files for flat file connections.
Browse button
Use to locate and select the directory where flat files are stored.
Date Format
Date format for date fields in the flat file. Select one of the following date formats:
  • - MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss
  • - YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS.US
Code Page
The code page of the system that hosts the flat file. Select one of the following code pages:
  • - MS Windows Latin 1. Select for ISO 8859-1 Western European data
  • - UTF-8. Select for Unicode data
  • - UTF-16 encoding of Unicode (Big Endian)
  • - UTF-16 encoding of Unicode (Lower Endian)
  • - Shift-JIS. Select for double-byte character data.
  • - ISO 8859-15 Latin 9 (Western European)
  • - ISO 8859-2 Eastern European
  • - ISO 8859-3 Southeast European
  • - ISO 8859-5 Cyrillic
  • - ISO 8859-9 Latin 5 (Turkish)
  • - IBM EBCDIC International Latin-1
  • - Japanese EUC (with \ <-> Yen mapping
  • - IBM EBCDIC Japanese
  • - IBM EBCDIC Japanese CP939
  • - PC Japanese SJIS-78 syntax (IBM-942)
  • - PC Japanese SJIS-90 (IBM-943)
  • - MS Windows Traditional Chinese, superset of Big 5
  • - Taiwan Big-5 (w/o euro update)
  • - Chinese EUC
  • - ISO 8859-8 Hebrew
  • - PC Hebrew (old)
  • - PC Hebrew (w/o euro update)
  • - EBCDIC Hebrew (updated with new sheqel, control characters)
  • - IBM EBCDIC US English IBM037
  • - UTF-32 encoding of Unicode (Lower Endian)
  • - ISO 8859-1 Western European.
  • - IBM EBCDIC French
  • - ISO 8859-10 Latin 6 (Nordic) *
  • - EBCDIC Finland, Sweden
  • - MOS-DOS Thai, superset of TIS 620
  • - 7-bit ASCII
  • - EBCDIC Finland, Sweden (w/euro update)
  • - MS-DOS Windows Latin 2 (Central Europe)
  • - Japanese EBCDIC-Kana Fujitsu
  • - ISO 8859-7 Greek
Characters in the file must be 2 bytes or less.
In advanced mappings, flat file objects in cloud storage connections must use UTF-8 encoding.
If the file contains supplementary characters with UTF-16 encoding, the task fails.
Note: When you use a flat file connection with the Shift-JIS code page and a UTF data object, be sure to install fonts that fully support Unicode.
* Data preview uses a similar ISO 8859-4 Scandinavian/Baltic code page, but runtime processing uses ISO 8859-10 Latin 6 (Nordic), so data preview and runtime encoding won't match.