Forum Discussion
Getting modification time in copy activity
Is it possible to use the Get Metadata activity?
I never considered this! It's a good pointer - but what next? I can't put the metadata into a variable in the notebook ("Error: Unable to convert metadata to string.")
I see that Set Variable would accept arrays, but how do I get that from inside the Notebook?
You can pass variables from the pipeline into the Notebook:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/notebook-activity#notebook-settings
How do you do the copy, btw? Are you using a loop to run through the files in the Azure Storage and copy every one of them?
If so, you could perhaps use the outputs from the Get Metadata activity to select which files to copy before copying them with the Copy Activity?
EDIT: If you need to convert between array and string, or other manipulations, you could have a look and see if some functions can work for you:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/expression-language#functions
E.g.
- join
- split
- array
- string
and Activities
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/activity-overview#control-flow-activities,
e.g.
- Filter
So, the original pipeline is Copy -> Notebook1 -> Notebook2 which is basically the ELT steps. The Copy gets all files as binary from the Azure source using flatten hierarchy. Notebook1 interprets the files (which are basically CSV, but with some weird details that dataflows can't handle) and adds their content to the table, and Notebook2 does some aggregations on all of the data (fresh and old).
Splitting this using Foreach would create quite some overhead, because the notebooks do have some setting up that is only done once. Also, I'm really not keen on rewriting the whole thing.
So I tried experimenting with Get Metadata -> Notebook to try interpreting the data.
Weirdly enough, it takes the combination
@join(array(activity('Get Metadata1').output), '$')to actually work. Unfortunately, that's still not what I'm looking for. It's some telemetry of the pipeline step, not the metadata I was looking for.
I really appreciate you taking the time to walk me through this, but I would much prefer some more detailed documentation or a debugging mode.
Did you try to use the ChildItems from the Metadata Activity?
Field list -> Arguments -> ChildItems
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/get-metadata-activity
Also ref.: