Getting modification time in copy activity

Question

Hello everyone!We are ingesting data from an Azure storage account. The pipeline has a copy activity to the OneLake/Files storage and a small notebook to translate the data into OneLake/Tables.The notebook does some logging, which serves us well, but we can't recognise when the data in Azure is stale.&nbsp;The idea would be to somehow get the modification time of each file on the source. Is there any way to do that?&nbsp;Best Regards,Jörg

frithjof_v · Answer

Is it possible to use the Get Metadata activity?

joergneulist · Answer

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?

frithjof_v · Answer

You can pass variables from the pipeline into the Notebook:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/notebook-activity#notebook-settings

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/author-execute-notebook#integrate-a-notebook

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

joergneulist · Answer

So, the original pipeline is Copy -&gt; Notebook1 -&gt; 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.&nbsp;So I tried experimenting with Get Metadata -&gt; 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.&nbsp;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.&nbsp;&nbsp;

frithjof_v · Answer

Did you try to use the ChildItems from the Metadata Activity?&nbsp;Field list -&gt; Arguments -&gt; ChildItems&nbsp;https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-factory/get-metadata-activity&nbsp;Also ref.:https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/General-Discussion/Get-and-use-metadata-in-a-pipeline/m-p/3875799

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Getting modification time in copy activity

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