Importance of serverTimeZone property of SOA FTP Adapter Connection JNDI

Oracle SOA Suite FTP Adapter can be used to transfer files to and from an FTP server. 

Before even you can use the FTP Adapter in your SOA Composite projects, an FTP Adapter Connection JNDI will need to be created. The set up can be done in the weblogic server against the FtpAdapter resource adapter application deployment by creating a JNDI entry in the Outbound Connection Pool. As part of the setup, mandatory  properties pertaining to the FTP server such as username, password, host and port will need to be mentioned. 

The serverTimeZone property is one such property which are often ignored when a request to create a new FTP connection JNDI is made. This property signifies the time zone of the server where the FTP application is running and can play a very pivotal role when polling a file after a minimum age delay. Say, for instance, you have a SOA composite that polls a file from a FTP server location after a minimum age delay of 2 minutes. If the server on which FTP application is running is on a different time zone when compared to that of the server where SOA composite is installed, the FTP poller of the SOA Composite will not pick the file as expected which may lead to lot of confusion during testing. In order to avoid such confusion, it is always preferred to set the serverTimeZone property when setting up the FTP Adapter Connection JNDI.

Now you may ask, I never bothered setting this property while configuring the FTP Adapter Connection JNDI, but still my services with FTP Adapter was working as expected. There may be some specific reasons for it:

• By default, serverTimeZone property is blank. When set to blank, the time zone of the SOA server is assumed. It could be that the SOA server time zone and FTP server time zone are one and the same.

• There was no minimum age delay specified in the FTP poller of your Composite project.

• The Adapter configured with non Get FTP operations - Put, List and Synchronized Get

It is hence recommended to set the serverTimeZone property of the FTP Connection JNDI to that of the FTP server time zone ID when you set it  up in the weblogic server especially required when your composite are having an FTP Poller in it with minimum file age set and with SOA and FTP server time zones are different; else expect the unexpected behaviour from the outcome of the service.

The time zone values that needs to go in to serverTimeZone property are those recognised by Java Classes.

No provision has been made for the SOA server to identify the Daylight Savings Time (DST) changes of the FTP server and adjust the FTP Adapter JNDI settings automatically; such changes will need to be done manually to the new time zone in the weblogic server.