How to read and write files on a network drive with an SMB Connector

March 24, 2023

In this article, we’ll see how to read files from a network drive and write a file to a network drive.

What is SMB?

The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is a network file sharing protocol to access remote files. It lets you share files, printers, serial ports and other resources on shared/network drive. Using this protocol, you can communicate with any server configured to receive an SMB client request.

By default, the SMB protocol is disabled on Windows. (Learn how to enable SMB protocol on Windows.)

Prerequisites:

Anypoint Platform account
Anypoint Studio 7.6 or later
SMB share and its authentication credentials — for this integration, we created SMB as a shared drive

SMB share snapshot

Let’s start with integration

To read and write files from/to SMB share follow these steps:

Download SMB Connector from Exchange (Version = 3.0.1)
Add SMB Connector Config in Global Elements and configure the following parameters:
Domain: Enter the Windows domain for the user to log in with
Host: Hostname of server hosting a shared drive
Share: The named path of shared drive
Username: Enter the username to login
Password: Enter the corresponding password
File age: Minimum age of file to perform the operation

SMB Connector configuration
Perform a Test Connection to make sure the connection details are correct

Test connection result
Read a file from a shared drive using the SMB File Read operation — refer to the following File Read configuration

SMB File Read operation configuration
Test the SMB file read flow using Postman; the output MIME Type is “application/octet-stream”

SMB file.csv file content

File Read operation Postman snapshot
Write a file to the network drive using the SMB File Write operation — refer to the following File Read configuration

SMB File Write operation configuration
Test the SMB file write flow using Postman

File Write operation Postman snapshot

SMB share snapshot after writing release.txt file