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Version: 8.10 (unreleased)

Use cases

Offering robust document handling capabilities within Camunda 8, users can efficiently manage large volumes of binary data such as PDFs and images across both development and production environments in SaaS and Self-Managed.

In this section we will cover three main use cases:

Two paths for document handling​

When a document flows through a process, it follows one of two paths. Understanding which path you need makes it easier to choose the right connector configuration.

Path 1: Document Store (opaque pass-through)​

The document is a blob that moves through the process. You don't need to read or manipulate its content — you just route it. The process never "looks inside" the file.

Typical examples:

  • A webhook receives a PDF, and you upload it to Amazon S3.
  • You download an image from Google Cloud Storage and send it via email.

On this path, the document is held in the Camunda document store and passed between systems as a reference.

Path 2: Inline (data the process works with)​

The content is actual process data, and it is not stored in the document store. It flows as regular process variables — strings or JSON objects — that happen to be written to or read from an external system. You either:

  • Write it: construct a .json, .csv, or .txt file from process variables and upload it to storage (for example, an error report built from process data). See inline documents.
  • Read it: download content from storage as JSON or text and use the values directly in FEEL expressions downstream. See return formats.

Path 2 does not involve the document store. It is best suited to smaller text or JSON files, since inline content is bounded by the process variable size limit.

Automate documents with intelligent document processing​

Document handling can be integrated with intelligent document processing (IDP). This allows you to extract specific data from a high volume of documents using an IDP application, and use the extracted data throughout your BPMN process.

Learn more about this in the IDP documentation: