With the advanced utilities workflow component, From file to workflow variable you can extract the contents of a file in the file system and put that into the contents of a variable. A related component is: Resource to workflow variable.

This can e.g. be used to retrieve the contents of an XML file into a variable and the workflow can then insert the contents of the variable into another XML file with a transformation.

The From file to variable component has these parameters:

1. File path
   The path to the file from which the contents is to be copied.
2. Variable name
   The name of the workflow variable in which the file contents is to be written to.