Calling LiveCycle processes via Remoting, involving Documents

One nice aspect of Adobe's LiveCycle is the ability to easily invoke a process using Flex Remoting. For 'primitive' types, such as Number, XML and String, it's a straight-forward case of passing them to the Remoting call. However, in some instances, it is necessary to pass a LiveCycle Document instance to a Remoting call. The recommended means of doing this involves a two-step process, where the Document is uploaded to the LiveCycle server, which returns a DocumentReference. This reference is passed to the Remoting call and LiveCycle marries everything up on its end.

I encountered an issue with this recently in an enterprise environment, due to the way DocumentReference works. After the Document has been stored on the server, LiveCycle constructs a URL pointing to it - based on the application URL of the Flex application that performed the upload. In our client's case, the application URL does not resolve inside their firewall. This meant that when LiveCycle attempted to load the Document based on the DocumentReference, it was unable to locate it.

Manipulating the DocumentReference on the client side was ruled out, due to the maintenance nightmare and security implications of having internal infrastructure details stored within the application itself. Resolving the issue on the server side was not a straightforward solution, as all processes involving Documents would have to be changed.

It turns out there's a simple solution; instead of performing a HTTP-based Document upload (which also has problems in a HTTPS context on non-IE browsers), it is possible to manually construct a DocumentReference instance, and pass in the file data by hand. For example:

var documentReference: DocumentReference = new DocumentReference(  );
documentReference.referenceType = DocumentReference.REF_TYPE_INLINE;
documentReference.bytes = yourByteArray;