Creating External Reference Files(3.0)

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Last updated: Apr 20, 2023 by Jenni Wallin
3 min read

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

Note!

The Properties file must reside on an NFS storage that is accessible by the platform pod. 

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 are set as String by default.

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. 

Advanced Tab Properties Format

Certain profiles, such as Aggregation, Couchbase, File System, Kafka, Redis, Workflow Bridge, and Web Service has a tab called Advanced, where you can configure various properties.

If you want to configure these properties using an external file, they should be stated using the format below.

key1=name.of.property1\=value1\n\
  name.of.property2\=value2\n\
  name.of.property3\=value3


Note!

The  "=" characters between property names and values must be escaped.