Creating and using zip files in Aria Orchestration Actions

[rosdev3]

Hi all,
I have an Actions script that gathers information from several external APIs and sends those via mail to a requester. This is called via an Aria Automation Catalog item / Workflow to get all the required inputs.
Since the gathered text-based information can become quite large, I decided to try to create a zip-compressed file that can be added in the mail.
I was able to use the ZipWriter class that is embedded in Orchestrator / build tools to generate the zip. the ZipWriter is finally called with the writeZip() function to build the zip to a a temp folder in the Orchestrator appliance.
This also where I get stuck.
There is a FileReader class available to read a file from the fileSystem, but it can only output the file as string what malforms the zip.
I then tried to import this zip file into a ResourceElement what works fine, the created ResourceElement results in the correct Zip file then you export it in the GUI.
The issue here is that there is in the code not a way to read it as a working zip. resourceElement.getContentAsMimeAttachment().content will also output as a malformed zip.

Does anybody have experience with working with Zip files in Actions?
Is there a solution available?

[VenelinBakalov]

Hi @rosdev3 , just to try and summarise, if I understand correctly you are able to create a zip file but you also need to unzip it or read it's content, is that the case?

Unfortunately, Build Tools for Aria does not add any actual vRO logic on top of what is already existing there, e.g. in your case the ZipWriter is just an interface of the actual ZipWriter vRO object that enables Typescript to transpile successfully and not complain that the class is unknown. And in that plugin I only see methods for adding and deleting content but non exposed for reading and unzipping.

A possible workaround that I could think of would be to add a polyglot subproject to your project. That would allow you to use a different runtime to execute your logic. After that you have multiple options, e.g.

• you can use some powershell commands just for reading the zip like the options described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37561465/how-to-read-contents-of-a-csv-file-inside-zip-file-using-powershell
• you can do the operation in python or nodejs or you can even do your entire code piece in those programming languages. There were a few suggestions here (I haven't tested them): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10308110/simplest-way-to-download-and-unzip-files-in-node-js-cross-platform

Whichever option you choose, once pushed to vRO it will take form of a polyglot action which you can call like any other vRO action, e.g. System.getModule("my.nodejs.actions").unzipFile(filePath).

In case you don't have experience with polyglot you can try creating a sample project from the following archetype: https://github.com/vmware/build-tools-for-vmware-aria/blob/main/maven/archetypes/polyglot/create.sh

It will create one for you that contains a sample for all 3 polyglot types - nodejs, ps and py.