Accessing Attachments on the first Action in a 7.2 WF

Question

A user fills out a form in Form Manager and they have attached some files to the workflow. The first step in the workflow is a script QPAC which needs to manipulate the attachments (need to extract the attachments, reader extend them and put the back...). If the first step were a user task in 7.2, you can copy the attachments to a document list from the previous step but if the first step in the workflow is a script, how do you access the attachments?
Ideally we would like to have all of the attachemnts available in a document list at the very first step of the workflow or at lest some mechanism to put them into a document list.

Answer 1

Chris, thanks for your suggestions. The code you supplied does allow the initial user task to be retrieved.
I'm having some difficulty getting the attachments out of the task object in a usable format.
task.getAttachments() returns a java.util.Collection according to the documentation. However, this seems to be wrong. It actually returns POFObjectSetWrapper which is undocumented. If you try to set a workflow variable with the return value from getAttachments() you get an error.
eg.
Collection list = task.getAttachments();
patExecContext.setProcessDataListValue("/process_data/attachments", list);
This gives you an error that it cannot coerce BOITaskAttachment objects to Document objects. "/process_data/attachments" is a Document List variable.
So I figured I need to iterate through the POFObjectSetWrapper object and create a new collection of document objects.
eg.
Collection docs = null;
for (Iterator it=list.iterator();it.hasNext();){
BOITaskAttachment att = it.next();
Document d = new Document(att.getContent());
docs.add(d);
This gives an error because altho the documentation indicates that the return from getAttachments() is a collection POFObjectSetWrapper does not seem to implement Collection. Nor does it implement POFObjectSet which would allow us to do the following:
while (list.next() ) {
BOITaskAttachment att = (BOITaskAttachment) atts.getBOIObject();
Document d = new Document(att.getContent());
docs.add(d);
I need to get the attachments into Workflow Variables... preferably a List of Documents.
Can anyone shed any light on how to do this?
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