The getContent(...) function has five useful variations, not counting syntax variations.  Other variations are possible, but they will, in practically all cases, result in a useless or null result.  The function retrieves the content of the currently referenced document as a String value.  It may optionally return the content of an image after resizing and possibly cropping it.  Since all documents are stored as bytes (a list of 8-bit values) and the function returns a String value (a list of 16-bit values) there must be some type of data conversion.  The getContent(...) function includes settings which determine how this data conversion will be done.

Syntax:
getContent( document-field )
getContent( document-field, encoding )
getContent( document-field, width, height )
getContent( document-field, width, height, resize-type )
getContent( document-field, width, height, resize-type, resize-type )
document-field.getContent( )
document-field.getContent( encoding )
document-field.getContent( width, height )
document-field.getContent( width, height, resize-type )
document-field.getContent( width, height, resize-type, transform-type )

Parameter	Description
document-field	The document field which references the document from which the content will be retrieved.  If no document is referenced by the field, the function will result in null.
encoding	The encoding parameter determines how the bytes constituting the file will be converted to characters in the String value returned by this function.  For all non-text documents the default is "BASE64".  For text documents the content type of the document is retrieved and scanned for a character set identifier.  If present, that character set will be used by default.  If the content type of the document does not include a character set identifier, then the default is "Cp1252" which is the Microsoft Windows varient of the Latin-1 codepage.  If an encoding is specified it must end with "charset=" followed by a character set identifier. Ideally, the value specified should be the full MIME type of the document with a character set specified.  A list of supported encodings can be found within Sun Microsystem's Java documentation.  Additionally, BlueStep supports Base64 and UTF-7.   If an invalid or unsupported encoding is specified the function will result in null.
width	The resized width of the image being retrieved.  The resulting image content may be narrower depending on the dimensions of the original image and the scaling type chosen.  If a null value is passed the image will not be width-bounded.
height	The resized height of the image being retrieved.  The resulting image content may be shorter depending on the dimensions of the original image and the scaling type chosen.  If a null value is passed the image will not be height-bounded.
resize-type	Determines how the image will be resized.  If an attempt is made to scale a document which is not an image, the function will result in null.  A list of possible values and their meanings is given in the article titled "Image Transformations."  The resulting image after a successful resize will always be a JPEG regardless of the orginal image type.
transform-type	Determines how the image will be rotated and flipped.  If an attempt is made to transform a document which is not an image, the function will result in null.  A list of possible values and their meanings is given in the article titled "Image Transformations."  The resulting image after a successful transform will always be a JPEG regardless of the orginal image type.