Programmatically upload a file into Appian from an external site ?

Question

Hi, 
 Is there a way to programmatically upload a file into Appian to a specific application document folder? 
 All capabilities available within Appian deals with documents within Appian. 
 Is there a way systematically push files into Appian's document/content management system from an external web-site? 
 The use case is, a user from another system is pushing pdf/image/doc files to our Appian application. 
 How to achieve this task in Appian? Is this possible? 
 
 Thanks.

andriyr · Answer

Hi Asif, 
 If the files are already stored on the external site you should be able to expose a simple web API + process model to handle this. 
 1. You would expose a web API that takes in parameters like "document URL" and "targetFolder" (or add logic to decide the target folder based on which user is performing the action, etc.) 
 2. From your external site you would call this web API. 
 3. The web API would pass this data to a process model, which would pull the file using the HTTP File Download Smart Service and store it in the appropriate folder.

arjunv864 · Answer

Hi Asif, I hope you have implemented this already. However I think the best way to implement this is as follows: 1. A Web API is created in Appian which will be exposed to external sites. 2. Since Web API doesn't accept document as such, the document has to be passed either as a URL(Appian process can perform HTTP Document Download with this URL) or as Base64 String. 3. If the external site can provide Appian the URLs that would be the ideal way to handle as there is less load on the API call. 4. If external System can provide you the Base64, you could write a utility plugin that converts base64 to Appian Document. However Please be aware that the process which holds base64 string in a variable is heavy when the document size is large and hence plan for optimized data management policies for such instances. Please let us know if you had taken any other approach in your solution. Regards, Arjun.