Configuring Your System for Attachments
In order to link attachments to objects in the system, there may be some configuration or implementation required to support the link. It is possible that one or more objects in your product already support attachments out of the box. Consult the product documentation for the specific object for confirmation. For objects in the system that do not support attachments out of the box, the following sections provide some guidelines for enabling support for attachments. Contact product support for more information.
Supporting Common Attachments
The attachments themselves are created / uploaded using the attachment portal. Refer to
Maintaining Attachments for more information.
If your implementation has a use case where one or more common attachments may be linked to an object (and the object does not already support this functionality), the object may need to be extended to capture the attachments.
• If the object includes a characteristic collection, this is a recommended way to capture attachments. A characteristic type should be defined for each type of attachment. The characteristic type should be a foreign key type and should reference the Attachment FK reference. The characteristic entity collection should include the object that the common attachment will be linked to.
• Most characteristic collections are sequence based characteristics and would support multiple entries for the same characteristic types, if multiple attachments are applicable.
• If the object to support the attachments is governed by a business object, the implementation must extend the business object to define one or more appropriate elements used to capture the attachments. If only one attachment of a certain type is allowed, a single flattened characteristic may be used. If multiple attachments of a certain type are allowed, the BO schema may define a “flattened list” exposing the sequence and the characteristic type.
• If the object is maintained on a “fixed page” with a generic characteristic collection, no additional configuration is needed to allow users to link attachments to that object.
Supporting Owned Attachments
When creating an attachment for a specific record, the attachment itself captures the information about the related record, namely its maintenance object code and its primary key. For these types of attachments, no configuration is needed on the related business object to capture the attachments, as was the case with common attachments.
However, it is recommended to configure the user interface of the related object so that the owned attachments can be viewed and maintained from that page. To do this, you may use the generic attachment zone provided by the product: F1-ATTCHOWN.
Note that your product may already have support for viewing and maintaining owned attachments on one or more if its base delivered portals.
Configuring Size Limit
The system allows for configuration of a size limit for uploading attachments. This is optional but the recommendation is to set this to a reasonable value so as to limit the ability to upload unreasonably big files. To configure this, navigate to
Feature Configuration. Search for an existing feature configuration with the Feature Type
General System Configuration. If one does not exist, create a feature configuration of this type. Select the
Maximum Attachment Size option and define an appropriate value.
Defining a New Attachment Type
As mentioned, the product provides support for several content types. If your implementation needs to support attachments for a content type not currently supported, create a new business object copying the configuration of an existing attachment business object.
Configure the following option types for the BO:
• Binary indicates whether the attachment data must be converted from binary format. Binary attachments are stored in the database as text, and are then converted back to the original format when retrieved.
• Content Type represents the browser's mime type of the attachment.
• Supported File Extension specifies the valid file extensions for the content type.
Once the business object is defined, it is ready for use.
Supporting File Name Exceptions
By default, the system prevents attachment file names from having special characters. If there is some reason that an implementation needs to define an attachment with special characters, there is a system property setting that may be configured to relax this validation. Contact your system administrator for support.
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