Read TCP Data

The Read TCP Data activity reads data from an open TCP connection. The connection must be opened by an activity or process starter that executed previously in the process definition. Activities that can open a TCP connection are: TCP Receiver, TCP Open Connection, and Wait for TCP Request. The activity that opens a TCP connection places a handle to the open connection in its connectionKey output element. The connectionKey is mapped to this activity’s input.

Field	Global Var?	Description
Name	No	The name to appear as the label for the activity in the process definition.
Description	No	Short description of the activity.
Type	No	Type of data to be read. This can be either Text or Binary. When Text is specified, the Separator, User Defined Separator, and Encoding fields appear. When Binary is specified, the Bytes to Read field appears.
Separator	Yes	The type of separator. This activity reads data from the TCP connection until the separator or the end of the data stream is encountered.
User Defined Separator	Yes	When User-defined separator is chosen from the list in the Separator field, this field appears. This field specifies the separator character to use. When Binary is selected in the Type field, a user-defined separator can be a string representation of a single byte value or it can be comma-separated byte values (for example, 0x0a, 0x0b, 0x0c). For valid string representations of byte values, refer to the Java documentation for the decode(String n) method of java.lang.Byte.
Encoding	Yes	When text data is specified, this field determines the character encoding of the text data.
Bytes to Read	Yes	When binary data is specified, this field specifies the number of bytes that should be read by this activity. If this field is left blank, then the activity reads until the end of the data stream is encountered.
Timeout	Yes	The time to wait (in milliseconds) for this activity to complete.

Input Item	Datatype	Description
connection	binary	The handle to the connection that you want to read data from. This connection is obtained from a previously executed activity in the process definition that opened the connection.
encoding	String	When text data is being read, this specifies the character encoding of the text. This value overrides the value specified in the Encoding field on the Configuration tab.
separator	String	When text data is being read, this specifies the separator to write after the body element is written to the TCP connection. This value overrides the value specified on the Configuration tab.
bytesToRead	number	When binary data is being read, this specifies the number of bytes that should be read. This value overrides the value specified in the Bytes to Read field on the Configuration tab.
timeout	number	Time to wait (in milliseconds) for this activity to complete.

Output Item	Datatype	Description
data	String	When text data is specified, this output element contains the text read from the TCP connection. The separator character, if specified, is not included in the output.
binaryData	binary	When binary data is specified, this output element contains the binary data read from the TCP connection.
endOfStreamReached	boolean	This element is set to true when the end of the data stream has been reached. This is useful when the activity is in an iteration loop and the activity is configured to read a number of bytes with each iteration. This element can be used in the condition of the loop to determine when the last set of bytes has been read.