Using the SMB Connector
The SMB Connector allows you to access your SMB server directly from Altair AI Studio. Both read and write operations are supported. This document will walk you through how to:
Connect to your SMB sever
To configure a new SMB connection you will need the connection details of your SMB Server (username, password, URL).
In Altair AI Studio, right-click on the repository you want to store your SMB connection in and choose
Create Connection.
You can also click on Connections >
Create Connection and select the repository from the dropdown of the following dialog.Enter a name for the new connection and set Connection Type to
SMB Server Connection:
Click on
Create and switch to the Setup tab in the Edit connection dialog.Fill in the connection details of your SMB Server:
Note the required pattern of SMB URL : smb://
:[port]/ While not required, we recommend testing your new SMB connection by clicking the
Test connection button.
If the test fails, please check whether the details are correct.Click
Save to save your connection and close the Edit connection dialog.
You can now start using the SMB operators!
Read from SMB Server
The Read SMB operator reads data from your SMB server. The operator can be used to load arbitrary file formats, since it only downloads and does not process the files. To process the files, you will need to use additional operators such as Read Document, Read Excel, or Read XML.
Let us start with reading a simple CSV file from SMB server.
Drag a Read SMB operator into the Process Panel. Select your SMB connection for the connection entry parameter from the Connections folder of the repository you stored it in by clicking on the
button next to it:
Alternatively, you can drag the SMB connection from the repository into the Process Panel and connect it to the Read SMB operator.
Click on the file chooser button
to view the files in your SMB server.
Select the file that you want to load and click Open.
As mentioned above, the Read SMB operator does not process the contents of the specified file. Read SMB only loads the selected file but does not process it. The actual processing of the data takes place in Read CSV operator. In our example, we have chosen a CSV file. This file type can be processed via the Read CSV operator.
Run
the process! In the Results perspective, you should see a table containing the content of the input CSV file.
You could now use further text processing operators to work with this document, e.g., to determine the commonness of certain events. To write results back to SMB server, you can use the Write SMB operator. It uses the same Connection Type as the Read SMB operator and has a similar interface. You can also read from a set of files in a SMB directory, using the Loop SMB operator. For this you need to specify the connection entry and the folder that you want to process, as well the steps of the processing loop with nested operators. For more details please read the help of the Loop SMB operator.