An attachment is data that is relevant to a task but is not defined as one of the input or output parts. This data can be of any type. For example, you can attach a picture, document, spreadsheet, or other file type to a variable in a BPEL process. The people activity can receive attachments from the BPEL process. If attachments exist, the people activity can then make them part of the task, and the attachments are displayed in users’ task client application.

Users can download and update the original attachments, or they can remove or add new attachments when they complete the task. When the people activity completes, it can copy all, none, or new attachments returned with the task to another process variable. If no attachments exist, the setting is ignored.

Using the _peopleActivityAttachments Variable to Copy Attachments

When you add a people activity to the process, a special variable is added to the Process Variables view for holding attachments.

For data attachments, you can create an assign activity with a copy operation that uses an attachment function to copy attachments from or to

_peopleActivityAttachments

. The attachment functions are listed in the Functions panel of the

Query Builder

, as shown in the illustration:

Setting the Attachment Propagation Property

In a people activity, on the All tab of the Properties view, you can make selections for copying attachments from the process to the people activity and from the people activity to the process: