Nintex 2016 on prem - Get Item Attachments into Task Approval Form

This requires a bit of a specific trickery because Task forms don't connect to the attachment field directly and grabbing the attachment column through workflow results in a boolean indicating the presence of an attachment.

However, you can still grab the attachment through a Webservice Query. You need to connect to:

{Site-url}/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx

(add in whatever the url is for the main site at {Site-url}).

Put in credentials that can view the item, and then use the method GetAttachmentCollection. GetAttachmentCollection wants a listName and an itemID, you can grab the former from the Commons and the latter from the item properties.

The webservice query will output the attachment urls, write them to a multiline text variable. You’ll probably need to follow it up with a Regular Expression action to remove clutter in the variable, it will be something like

<Attachments xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/"><Attachment>{attachment url here}</Attachment></Attachments>

So you need to remove the clutter so you only keep the attachment url. Once you have the attachment url in a workflow variable you can then refer to that workflow variable on the Nintex Task form (use text with layout, you can put hyperlinks in there). I haven’t tested how it works with multiple attachments but I’m fairly sure the webservice grabs all of them, experiment a bit to see what it puts out.

(obviously put these actions in the workflow before the workflow assigns the task)

Nintex Support gets the credit for helping me on this one.  The 2nd article was PERFECT

I found a discussion, reviewing this, but there is limited information in the actual execution of the steps:

https://community.nintex.com/archive-25/adding-attachment-link-on-a-flexi-task-form-47990 

This article looks more promising with steps that leverage a call web service action:

https://nicoleprestby.com/2017/12/19/add-list-item-attachments-to-task-form-using-nintex-workflow-and-forms/

This worked to get the attachments inside the Task Form BUT how do we get those SAME attachments to merge in the DocGen PDF?