Working with File Action in OWS

How to Limit Modules Available in the Control Panel (Premium Modules)

By Paul Deschenes

February 2010

In this tutorial we demonstrate working with File Action in your Open Web Studio configurations.

The File Action is a very flexible action which provides many possibilities for working with files on your website. In this tutorial we walk you through three examples, these cover: How to edit a file on your website, how to upload a file to your website and also how to import an Excel or CSV file into a table within your SQL database.

You can download the latest version of OWS from here: www.openwebstudio.com

If you are new to OWS we recommend you first of all view the six part series on How to Build a Knowledge Base Article Module.

The videos cover:

Video 1 - Introduction, How to Edit a File on Your Website

Introduction
How to add an OWS module to the page
How to create a new configuration and set the general properties
How to set the module to the new configuration
No Query Template
HTML code for adding text into a file on your website
Viewing the Compression.Config XML file
Adding the Actions
How to 'listen' for the query string
How to load a file from a directory into an Action variable
How to create a Query to add the text into the text file
How to save the edited text file
Testing adding text into a file

Time Length: 7min 52secs

Video 2 - How to Upload a File to Your Website, Creating a Contacts SQL table and CSV file

HTML to create an input form element for uploading a file
The OWS ACTION tag for uploading files
How to configure a Message listener
How to create a file action to upload a file
Testing uploading a file to the website
How to import data into a Contacts table
How to create the Contacts SQL table
Viewing the Excel file which contains the data to import
Creating a CSV format file
HTML to import a CSV file
Configuring a Message listener for the import file
How to create a file action to import the CSV file

Time Length: 7min 21secs

Video 3 - Configuring file action to run a SQL Query and import the data from the CSV file into the Contacts SQL table

Mapping the columns from the CSV file to the Contacts SQL table
Run As Process
Name Action Variables: Percentage, Status, Complete
HTML to query the SQL table Contacts and display the data after import
Testing the import CSV file
Checking the debugging information
Viewing the execution and import of all data from the CSV file into the SQL table

Time Length: 6min 31secs

Total Time Length: 21min 44secs