Understanding parameters

Parameters are values that are passed to activities from an orchestration, or to the orchestration from an activity. The values from parameters are used to initialize the variables that comprise the orchestration.

Parameters can be either input parameters or output parameters. Activities can either contain just input parameters, just output parameters, or both.

You map variables of an orchestration to the input parameters of an activity in the Map Inputs task. During run time, the values of the variables are passed into the input parameters of the activity and are used by the activity. For example during run time, the FTP Put File activity creates a file using the name provided in the input parameter called filename and with the data provided in the input parameter called data. The values for the filename and data input parameters are populated by the data in variables in the orchestration.

Output parameters are return values from an activity. For example, the FTP Poll Directory activity passes three output parameters to an orchestration, as shown in the following table, each of which can be used to initialize a variable in the orchestration. Output parameters can be mapped from an activity to the orchestration.
Table 1.
Activity Parameter Description

FTP Poll Directory

filename

Name of the file obtained from the FTP server.

FTP Poll Directory

data

String containing the contents of the file.

FTP Poll Directory

timestamp

Timestamp on the file.




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Timestamp icon Last updated: Thursday, 2 June 2016


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