Consuming files stored in the Azure Blob Storage within Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations using X++ code 

Let’s consider a scenario where third-party business application uses Azure Blob as a central repository for storing the files, which in turn needs to be consumed by Dynamics 365 finance and operations. 

Following standard .Net libraries helps to consume those files:

• using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage;
• using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Blob;
• using System.IO;

Part-2: Consuming files stored in the Azure Blob Storage within Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations using X++ code

Using the container connection created in Part-1 (Establish connection with the blob container) we can perform some basic operations with blob folder, as part of this blog we cover following area:

1. Get file name list
2. Get file memory stream
3. Read the content of the file line by line
4. Read the field value from the line

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) Get File Name List

This section describes how to retrieve list of file name present in the blob folder using standard classes:

• CloudBlobDirectory – Used to communicate with the blob folder
• IEnumerable – Used here to store list of file names retrieved
• IListBlobItem – Represents the list of blob items accessed
• CloudBlockBlob –  Represents a blob that is uploaded as a set of blocks 

Using the connection established in previous section, following code will fetch the list of files names from the cloud blob directory:

1. CloudBlobDirectory  cloudBlobDirectory;// The directory of the blob container
2. container  con;
3. cloudBlobDirectory = cloudBlobContainer.GetDirectoryReference(“SainaCloudConsulting\Test1”);//File path where the files are stored
4. System.Collections.IEnumerable lstEnumarable = cloudBlobDirectory.ListBlobs(false, 0, null, null);
5. System.Collections.IEnumerator lstEnumarator = lstEnumarable.GetEnumerator();
6. List filenames = new List(Types::String); 
7. while(lstEnumarator.MoveNext())
8. {
9.      IListBlobItem item = lstEnumarator.Current; 
10.      if(item is CloudBlockBlob)
11.      {
12.           CloudBlockBlob blob = item;
13.            blob.FetchAttributes(null, null, null);
14.            con = str2con(blob.name, “/”);
15.            filenames.addStart(conPeek(con,conlen(con)));
16.      }
17. }

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2) Get file memory stream

After retrieving the file names list, iterate the file list to get each file names, and get the file memory stream content.

1. CloudBlobDirectory  cloudBlobDirectory = _blobContainer.GetDirectoryReference(“SainaCloudConsulting\Test1”);
2. CloudBlockBlob  blob = cloudBlobDirectory.GetBlockBlobReference(“TestFile.txt”);
3. System.IO.Stream  memory = blob.OpenRead(null,null,null);

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3) Read the content of the file line by line

Using the .Net standard IO class libraries, contents of the file can be read.

1. System.IO.StreamReader streamReader = new System.IO.StreamReader(memory);
2. Str   strRecord = streamReader.ReadLine(); //read each line in the file

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4) Read the field value from the line

Assuming the data is separated using comma field delimiter, we store each field data into container variable as shown below:

1. while(!System.String::IsNullOrEmpty(strRecord))
2. { 
3.      try
4.      {
5.           Container conRecord = str2con_RU(strRecord, ‘,’);// Here the file delimiter is ‘,’.
6.           conPeek(conRecord, 1);// read first field data in the file line
7.           conPeek(conRecord, 2);// read second field data
8.      }
9. }

This blog has covered the list of operations used to read the files from the blob container and perform necessary business action in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operation.