Mike,
I double checked with engineering and this cannot be done. I though that creating a custom render service would work, but it wont since it has to return a document variable and we can only change the data of a swf when its in a Form variable. And there is no way to go from Form to document variable because one contains the content and the other one is only a pointer.
You can define default data on the variable settings under Default Data, but this data is essentially hard coded, which is not ideal.
Youre only option at this point is to populate from the formInitData event in the swf form which can call a database or a web service.
Engineering will make that Default Data a variable in a next release of the product which should get you across this problem but nothing to help us now.
Sorry for the confusion.
Jasmin