Need to get a document or doc ID by UUID or document name

There is the content tools plugin https://community.appian.com/b/appmarket/posts/content-tools
Is there a reason document UUIDs are being stored? If you need to have the same document in multiple environments it's best to use a constant.

Hi Danny,

Thanks for the plugin.  Yes, the reason is that my use case is to query some sort of identifier from the DB, and display an image dynamically in a form.  There could be hundreds and eventually thousands of different images that need to be displayed dynamically.  

As a follow up question, how can I get the UUID of a newly uploaded document?

If they have to deploy documents, I still recommend a constant per document. What is there use case for deploying documents between environments? If the user is uploading a document, I imagine it will be in their production environment where the ID will remain constant

Danny, that is a good point.  The reason is that while the client is imagining a future state where the user will have the ability to add images to be used dynamically on forms at some point, my team is in a position where we will need to maintain a list of these images manually for some time before the user has the ability to upload themselves. It would make that easier to manage if we could set it up for one environment, and not have to change the IDs in the DB when deploying.

If I was to use doc id, what is the best way to retrieve the document id for a newly uploaded document?  I know I have to submit the form first, and retrieve it after submission, but I am not sure how to retrieve it the newly uploaded document.

Thanks again

Have you considered adding some kind of "Admin" page that would allow you to manage the images manually at the beginning? That's often what I've seen in cases like this because you then wouldn't have to do a deployment. Also, I'm not sure how often you expect to need to change these documents, but it will be a lot easier to manage them directly from the production UI rather than doing a deployment each time.

Like Danny said, I'd recommend avoiding the use of UUID for documents if possible. Granted it would probably work fine, but just seems unecessary.

Thanks Peter, that is what I will be doing eventually (described in my previous comment). I think I will just have to move it up the priority list.  

If I was to use doc id, what is the best way to retrieve the document id for a newly uploaded document?  I know I have to submit the form first, and retrieve it after submission, but I am not sure how to retrieve it the newly uploaded document.

Great question! On your form, have a rule input of type document which you'll use as the value and saveInto field for your file upload. Then, in the process model have a corresponding process variable of type document to map to your form rule input. You can then use this process variable to get the document ID by doing document(pv!myDoc,"id")

Thank you Danny!  I will give this a try.

This works consistently only if you introduced a delay after the submit action before accessing the documents.  Otherwise you get this error -  

a!forEach: Error in a!forEach() expression during iteration 1: Expression evaluation error at function 'document' [line 4]: Document Does Not Exist or has been Deleted) (Data Outputs).

The delay of 1 minute gives Appian enough time to finish the uploading of the files internally to the correct folder before you can access the files' attributes. 

NOTE - I have also noticed that documents couldn't be accessed in the same process model that is called in the submit action of the file upload form if activity chaining is enabled in the process model.  The behavior was random.  I have disabled activity chaining in my PM just to avoid surprises. 

walkers0001, Have you been able to retrieve the uuid of a document or folder?  If so, could you please post how you were able to do it?

Assuming you have the Content Tools plug-in, you want the getcontentobjectdetailsbyid() function.  Since this just returns a string instead of dictionary data (and the string isn't even JSON ...), you will want to set up an Expression Rule to help parse the outputs of the rule if you'll be using it regularly.  Disregard this if you would only be using it on a one-off manual basis to pull the UUID for random things.

Hy if I need to access any document from another environment through UUID or by anything, can someone suggest?

Hy if I need to access any document from another environment through UUID or by anything, can someone suggest?

Accessing a document from another environment isn't directly possible. You can build an integration around it where you can send document from one env to another in base64 string and then get the properties of it using document function, after the document gets downloaded.