Applies to version: 2023 R3 and above, author: Krystyna Gawryał
Background
The OCR AI recognition action, thanks to its integration with ABBYY FineReader, reads the relevant items from the file attached to the workflow instance and then enters their values into the corresponding form fields. Starting with version 2022 R1, in certain cases described here, such OCR operations may produce errors such as:
"'<', hexadecimal value 0x3C, is an invalid attribute character".
The reason for the error is that the resulting OCR .xml file stored in the text column of the attachment database (ATF_FRData column in the WFAttachmentFiles table) contained Unicode characters. In turn, the attachment database was created in non-Unicode mode and the selected types of its text columns were varchar and text. These settings ultimately prevented the .xml file containing the OCR results from being read and the action from being executed correctly.
The problem with creating attachment databases has been fixed and no longer occurs in the latest versions of the system, while it may have occurred in versions older than 2023.1.3.289, 2024.1.1.130, and 2025.1.1.23. The problem has been fixed in version 2023.1.3.327 by adding a mechanism in the installer (launched when installing or updating a WEBCON BPS version) to automatically update the attachment database, switch it to Unicode mode and change the text column types from varchar or text to nvarchar or ntext. The automatic update can take up to a few minutes for each attachment database.
Manual update of the attachmentdatabase
For environments with large content and attachment databases where the text columns contain large amounts of data (the amount of data in the ATF_FRData column exceeds 3 GB), the automatic update is not performed and the WEBCON BPS version update is stopped.
This approach has been taken because there is a real risk that the duration of the automatic update will be significantly prolonged. For this reason, the database update must be planned and performed manually.
If a manual update of the attachment database is required, please contact WEBCON Technical Support or the WEBCON Partner.