Creating External Reference Files

Owned by Kevin Wu
Last updated: Jun 15, 2023
2 min read

In the External Reference Profile, you may specify a properties file that contains the External Reference values.

Note!

The Properties file should reside on the Platform Container host.

If you are using characters encoded with something other than iso-8859-1 in your property file for External References, the property file has to be converted to ASCII by using the Java tool native2ascii. For further information about using native2ascii, see the JDK product documentation.

If you have a large number of external references, this may impact the workflow startup time. It is therefore recommended that you do not exceed 1000 external references per file. If you require a number greater than 1000, split the references across multiple files and profiles.

Typical Format

A properties file contains key-value pairs. The typical format of a properties file is:

Key1=Value1 Key2=Value2 Key3=Value3

The Value data type can be a string, a boolean, a password, or a numeric value. Boolean values can be represented by true, false, yes, or no, and are not case-sensitive.

Password values must be represented by a string that has been encrypted by the command mzsh encryptpassword.

If the file contains two or more identical keys with different values, the last value is the one that is applied.

Add a slash ("\") to continue the value on the next line. If the value is a multi-line string use ("\n\") to separate the rows.

key1=PrettyLongValueThat\ ContinuesOneTheSecondLine key2=north\n\ center\n\ south



Note!

When creating an External Reference File, it is important to keep in mind the format of the data you wish to specify. For example, consider an External Reference file (ExtRef.txt) below containing the following data with the value types list, map, and string.

MY_STRING=A string value MY_LIST=["Value 1","Value 2"] MY_MAP={"Key 1":"Value 1","Key 2":"Value 2","Key 3":"Value 3"}

When this ExtRef.txt file is imported into the External Reference Profile, it will be displayed as shown below. As you can see, the Value Type for all keys is set as String by default.

External Reference Profile – Properties File View Screen

To fix this, you will need to double-click on each Value Type and use the Edit External Reference Definition window to set the correct Value Type. Now you can observe that the Value is displayed correctly for all the Keys in your External Reference File. 

External Reference Profile – Properties File View Screen with Keys added