Work with Attachments

This topic helps you with information that you can use to work with attachments associated with your REST resources.

Some tasks or business processes require that you store and maintain documents, images, or other files in the form of attachments for future reference. Attachments may exist in the form of large objects, text, an image, or a media file. In general, Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM REST APIs support working with all types of attachments.

Based on your business requirement, you may access the REST resources that support attachments and perform any of the CRUD operations. To get the expected outcome, you must understand how to retrieve and store attachments using the HTTP methods. You also must know the specific resource attributes and the relevant values to pass in the request. These details could vary based on the data type of the attachment and the location where it's stored. In the following sections, let's understand a little more about how to work with attachments.

Storage

Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM supports working with attachments in two ways:

• Storing attachments in a column within the same database table
• Storing attachments in an external content repository such as Oracle WebCenter Content

How you perform the CRUD operations on attachments depends on where the attachments are stored and in which data type. The following table can help you understand a little more about these storage locations and some key points to consider while working with them.

Storage Location	Key Points
If attachments are stored in the column of a database table	Stored content is accessible in the form of an enclosure link with support for BLOB or CLOB data type attachments. Supported data types are large objects, text, and multimedia.
If attachments are stored in an external content repository	Facilitate download using the FileContents enclosure link that contains a reference to the file on the repository. Attachment is stored as a child resource. It can include multiple attachments in the form of a list. Supported attachment types are FILE, TEXT, and URL.

How you work with attachments depends on the way a particular business object is available as a REST endpoint and the permitted actions. Unless specifically restricted, all attachment resources support CRUD operations.