For a large retail corporation that manages 800+ vendors, weekly reports and new documents will need to be supplied to the vendors via the vendor sites. Manually navigating to each site and uploading the appropriate documents is incredibly inefficient in this scenario.

Objective

Implement a file uploader that sorts documents to the appropriate document library based on the filename.

Overview

Documents specific to vendor sites are generated and saved to a network file share. The files follow a naming convention that contains required aliases and keywords to sort the documents into the appropriate folders. Once sorted, the files are uploaded to the vendor site and sorted into the appropriate document libraries based on keywords in the filename.

Obstacles

• The amount of time required to sync multiple files at once should be kept at a reasonable length.
• Document may fail to upload from time to time due to a variety of issues, such as network connectivity drops.

Solution

Each vendor site is assigned one or more unique aliases that is utilized by the File Synchronizer (FS) tool. Similarly, document filenames will need to contain these aliases for the tool to accurately do its job. The FS tool uploads files dropped in a file share to the appropriate site by matching the aliases in the document filename.

The network file share maintains an auto-generated folder for each site with the appropriate alias

Log file showing directory creation

File types are also configurable to sort files into different document libraries within each site. The FS tool will look for specified keywords defined in the file type listing and match the terms to the filename. Once terms have been matched, the document will be routed to the appropriate location. Documents that do not match any file type terms will be dropped into the default location.
Of course, there will always be reasons for an upload failure, so steps are implemented to manage and log these failures. Documents that fail to upload the first time will be reattempted after a predetermined amount of time, and the failure will be logged. Documents that fail to upload after a predetermined number of tries will be moved to another "catch-all" folder on the file share for review, and the failure will be logged.

Upload log showing failures and retries​