SAP EP – Netweaver Portal

Symptom

Text document attachment created in backend via function module SO_DOCUMENT_INSERT_API1 is not displayed correctly in uwl. The symptom might be that ? (question marks) (or some other characters) are displayed instead of the content of the text attachment.

Other terms

SO_DOCUMENT_INSERT_API1, UWL, Universal Worklist, attachment, text document, question marks, business workflow attachment, object_content, contents_hex

Reason and Prerequisites

The reason is that the SO_DOCUMENT_INSERT_API1 has two tables for the attachment to be added. One table is contents_hex and the second is
object_content. The object_content corresponds to the text attachment and need to be used when text attachment should be uploaded and the content_hex table should be used when attaching binary data.
Business Workflow can handle the case when text file is accidentally attached as binary (via content_hex) thus the attachment is displayed correctly in Business Workflow. However UWL (Universal Worklist) expects that the text documents are added via object_content and won’t display attachment content properly when added as binary data (via contents_hex).
The documentation of SO_DOCUMENT_INSERT_API1 function module’s corresponding tables:
OBJECT_CONTENT LIKE SOLISTI1 Document contents (text)
CONTENTS_HEX LIKE SOLIX Document contents (binary).

Solution

When adding text data via SO_DOCUMENT_INSERT_API1 use object_content table instead of content_hex in order for the UWL to display text attachment properly.