from my understanding, if I use the “transient” option the variable itself won’t be persisted to the database. However, this won’t have effect on the binary itself, which will still be persisted into the “act_ge_bytearray” table.
This can of course be cleaned up later on through history.
So there’s effectively no way for a “File” to just pass through Camunda without being saved into the database at all?
Another option which I see as a possibility (still need to test this, though), is that the “transient” option is ignored when variables are copied between activities (through variable mapping, for example).
So even though the variable is originally transient, it looses this aspect through copying.
The reason for the behavior I observed is the fact that the “File” variable was marked as “transient” and “local” at the same time. I’m not sure whether to consider this as a bug or not, though.
As soon as the variable was marked as “transient” only, everything started working as expected.