ESG Appendix B: Creating tar Files and Compressing Files for Submission
ESG User Guide - Table of Contents
During the file upload process, the FDA ESG Web Interface utilizes the tar functionality for file system consolidation when submitting files. The process occurs during the electronic "signing" of the submission. Before the file is transmitted, it is tarred and gzipped, encrypted, signed, and mime-wrapped (or packaged) before transmitting to the FDA ESG.
.tar.gz files should not contain files or sub-directories that have a "." (dot) at the beginning of its name.
The figure below illustrates this process.
Upon receiving the file, signature is verified; file is unzipped/untarred, unwrapped/decrypted
Because this process is done automatically during the signing of the file, no intervention is required from the user to ensure the file is tarred and gzipped.
Creating tar files for Gateway-to-Gateway Submissions
Partners are required to both tar and gzip (compress) multifile submissions. (gzip is the original UNIX ZIP format and is used as a compression utility to reduce the size of the archive file.)
For best optimization when processing and transmitting large submission files, first "tar" the files and then compress them using gzip. Valid files acquire a .tar.gz extension resulting from the process of tarring the directory (containing multiple files) and gzipping the created tar archive.
The figure below illustrates this process.
Upon receiving the file, signature is verified; file is unzipped/untarred, unwrapped/decrypted, delivered to Center Holding Area
To fulfill this requirement, the current AS2 solution should have a tar and zip utility prescribed. There are Operating System-specific utilities available for performing the tar operation.
If the application does not have tar/gzip capabilities, a utility must be acquired. Listed below are recommended utilities that support tar and gzip manually (external from application) or automatically (to be integrated with application).
To create tar files: GNU Tar Utility at http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/tar.html --]){kind=small}
To gzip files: gzip Utility at http://www.gzip.org/
Apache Ant Java package should be integrated into the application when creating .tar.gz files automatically through the application.