Passing parameters to a workbench process invoked by watched folders

Question

I am trying to pass values to a workbench process that is invoked by watched folders. What I need to be able to do is at least provide a path (string) to the process so that it knows where to store one of the result files. This value is not always the same and for reasons that I don't want to get into, I don't want to use an "output" variable to send it to the watched folder's "result" folder.
So, I had the idea of saving the value in a text file with a standard name (same for each call to the process) and my process would look for this file and import the file contents into a string variable. I wasn't able to do this.
#1 I haven't found a way to store the file content of an existing document variable into a string variable. Is this possible?
#2 I tried using the "Read String" service to read the contents from the file and store them into a string variable. Should be pretty straight forward, right? Turns out the process would just hang when trying to read the file into a string. I then tried changing the output variable from type 'string' to type 'document' and whammo, it worked. The variable logger showed the correct file contents. So it appears that "Read String" and "Read Document" do the exact same thing; read a file into a *document* variable! So now I'm stuck with issue #1 again...
Any suggestions? I have version 8.0.1 of LiveCycle installed.

Answer 1

Let's take a step back here.
The Read String activity will read the content of a file that contains strings into a STRING variable. In fact you need to provide a variable of type string for the output results.
I think the problem is that your trying to read XML content which is not treated as a string by LiveCycle.
If you want to read XML content then use the Read Document activity. It'll put the content of the XML in a document variable. Then you can use a SetValue and put the content of the document variable into a XML variable and use xPath to get to the value you need.
/process_data/myXML = /process_data/myDocument
You have to use a XML variable if you want to use xPath. xPath won't work on a string variable since the string content doesn't really have structure. You need a XML variable which gives you the structure.
If you really want to, you can convert the XML into a string (using the serialize xPath function) and have the XML treated as a string but I don't think that's what you're trying to do.
Jasmin