Best practices for file ingestion and state management in workflows

[dragospadurariu]

Hi Team,

I am building a workflow using agent-framework that needs to ingest and analyze various files (PDFs, images, docx etc.). I'm looking for guidance on the best way to handle this in a graph-based workflow:

• State Management: Is it best practice to load file content into the WorkflowContext / State object, or should nodes pass file paths and load data locally as needed?
• Multi-modality: How should image data be "carried" through the workflow so downstream multimodal executors can access it?
• Patterns: Is a single Ingestor node preferred or should I use a fan-out to specialized parsing nodes for different file types?

The current workflow samples focus on text inputs, so any advice on handling file-heavy state would be helpful. Thanks!