Output adapters

An output adapter plugin is a function that can manipulate the output of services depending on their produced data type (see the dataType property of the service parameter data model, as well as the dataType property of the process chain argument data model).

In other words, if an output parameter of a processing service has a specific dataType defined in the service’s metadata and this data type matches the one given in the output adapter’s descriptor, then the plugin’s function will be called after the service has been executed. Steep will pass the output argument and the whole process chain (for reference) to the plugin. The output argument’s value will be the current result (i.e. the output file or directory). The plugin can modify this file or directory (if necessary) and return a new list of files that will then be used by Steep for further processing.

Steep has a built-in output adapter for the data type directory. Whenever you specify this data type in the service metadata, Steep will pass the output directory to an internal function that recursively collects all files from this directory and returns them as a list.

The example output adapter fileOrEmptyList described below is also included in Steep. It checks if an output file exists (i.e. if the processing service has actually created it) and either returns a list with a single element (the file) or an empty list. This is useful if a processing service has an optional output that you want to use as input of a subsequent for-each action or of the current for-each action via yieldToInput.

If required, the function can be a suspend function.

suspend fun myOutputAdapter(output: model.processchain.Argument,
  processChain: model.processchain.ProcessChain,
  vertx: io.vertx.core.Vertx): List<Any>

- name: fileOrEmptyList
  type: outputAdapter
  scriptFile: conf/plugins/fileOrEmptyList.kt
  supportedDataType: fileOrEmptyList

import io.vertx.core.Vertx
import io.vertx.kotlin.core.file.existsAwait
import model.processchain.Argument
import model.processchain.ProcessChain
 
suspend fun fileOrEmptyList(output: Argument, processChain: ProcessChain,
    vertx: Vertx): List<String> {
  return if (!vertx.fileSystem().existsAwait(output.variable.value)) {
    emptyList()
  } else {
    listOf(output.variable.value)
  }
}