Data Transport Agent - Group Management

The concept of groups is an extremely powerful feature of the Data Transport Agent. As the name suggests, they allow you to group arbitrary collections of transport items into a meaningful process. Using groups, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The first thing to know about groups is that they don't change any of your existing DTA modules in any way, they simply provide a way for you to link them together. For this reason, it is also possible to add a single DTA module into a number of different groups. This small feature can greatly enhance your productivity by allowing you to create (for example) a generic File Backup module which is run at the start of all your group processes.

Example - Archiving Changes to a Third Party Website

If you are monitoring a third party website and want to track all the changes that are made to it, simply create a group with the following items:

Create a Web Download module which queries the website in question, and saves the downloaded content to a file on your computer if it has changed
Use a File Backup module to transfer this downloaded content to your archive

Example - Deploying a Web Development Project

If you are a programmer and are building a website, you could create a DTA group which would provide you with one-click deployment:

Create a File Backup module to first backup the existing website into a zip file and archive it
Create a Command Line module to download the latest copy of the website from your source control provider (for example, SubVersion SVN)
Create a Command Line module to optional compile your website to some deployment directory
Create an FTP Upload module to deploy the changed files to your web server
Create a Website Query module to query the newly deployed website, using regular expression matching to check for changes
Use the built-in email notification functionality of the DTA to send a status email to the client, informing them of the change