The File Reader/Writer Modules

With our newly released File Reader and File Writer modules you can enhance file processing capabilities by supporting both text and binary files. These modules replace the previous File TextReader and File TextWriter modules, which are now archived (existing Flows continue to work, but you cannot build new Flows with these modules).

With the default settings the File Reader module will try to detect if the file content is text or binary, but you can also force it to use one or the other format .If text is detected, the output will be a string; if bytes are detected, the output will be an array of bytes (byte[]). When handling text files, the module tries to determine the correct text encoding to ensure all characters are accurately read. If it cannot detect the encoding, it defaults to UTF-8, but you also have the option to specify a different encoding if needed. The input file can be a static filename, or provided dynamically with the input messages.

The File Writer module will determine the type of file to create based on the data type it receives, if it receives a string it will create a text file and if it receives a byte array it will create a binary file. For text files the encoding defaults to UTF8, but can be changed.

Detailed documentation, with examples, is available in the module documentation.

As a side note, the SMTP Send module has also been updated to support binary file attachments, so you can now attach for example PDFs and Excel files.