SOAP with Attachments

[Bryan Dickerson]

Newbie warning: I'm still learning about SOAP, but my boss is convinced
that the only way a VB.Net web service can properly interpret (and
eventually send) SOAP with Attachments from (to) another product is with a
3rd party product--he wants to buy this product:
http://www.alotsoft.com/alotsoftweb/soap_attachment.jsp. I'm using VS 2003.
Is he correct? I say that it could be done without the 3rd party, but as I
said I'm still a newbie, so that's why I'm asking...

Thanx!

 

[CMM]

SWA was ill-conceived and not much of a "standard." You can send any data
you want over soap as long as you mime or base64 encode it. The service on
the side just reverses the process. The problem is coming up with a
"Standard," which no one has seemed to come up with. Here's an interesting
link
http://www.topxml.com/WS-web-servic...send-attachments-with-Web-Services-today.aspx

So, I guess your boss is probably right. Though I can't see why coming up
with your implementation to handle SWA would be so hard.

 

[Bryan Dickerson]

Interesting article, though, as I noted in the original post, I'm still
learning a lot of the terminology. Can you point me to an example on the
web using VS 2003?

 

[CMM]

First off, are you responsible for both sides of the service? Or are you
communicating with some Java web service or whatever?

If you're in control, you can just read in the file as a byte array and
convert it to a Base64 string (Convert.ToBase64String(...)) and either
return the string as the output of your web method or in a string array (if
sending multiple files). SOAP can handle this. It's pretty standard stuff.

You can just tell the other guys, "well, I'm sending this as a Base64 string
array.... deal with it!" If they're the ones sending you the file, and
they're using some other "way" of ataching files, then you may need to
follow your boss' advice.

Frankly the whole "standards debate" confuses me. I don't understand what
the big deal is about. I guess the "no-frills" Base64 method is slow.