SOAP messages with attachments - Writing the WSDL extensions

 

Usage Scenario

The following example WSDL illustrates a simple operation that has one attachment called attch

<binding name="MyBinding" type="tns:abc" >
  <soap:binding style="rpc" transport="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http"/>
  <operation name="MyOperation">
    <soap:operation soapAction=""/>
    <input>
      <mime:multipartRelated>
        <mime:part>
          <soap:body use="encoded" namespace="http://mynamespace"
            encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding"/>
        </mime:part>
        <mime:part>
          <mime:content part="attch" type="text/html"/>
        </mime:part>
      </mime:multipartRelated>
    </input>
  </operation>
</binding>

In this type of WSDL extension...

• There must be a part attribute (in this example attch) on the input message for the operation (in this example MyOperation). There can be other input parts to MyOperation that are not attachments.

• In the binding input there must either be a <soap:body> tag or a <mime:multipartRelated> tag, but not both.

• For MIME messages, the <soap:body> tag is inside a <mime:part> tag. There must only be one <mime:part> tag that contains a <soap:body> tag in the binding input and that must not contain a <mime:content> tag as well, because a content type of text/xml is assumed for the <soap:body> tag.

• There can be multiple attachments in a MIME message, each described by a <mime:part> tag.

• Each <mime:part> tag that does not contain a <soap:body> tag contains a <mime:content> tag that describes the attachment itself. The type attribute inside the <mime:content> tag is not checked or used by the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF). It is there to suggest to the application using WSIF what the attachment contains. Multiple <mime:content> tags inside a single <mime:part> tag means that the backend service expects a single attachment with a type specified by one of the <mime:content> tags inside that <mime:part> tag.

• The parts="..." attribute (optional) inside the <soap:body> tag is assumed to contain the names of all the MIME parts as well as the names of all the SOAP parts in the message.

 

See Also

Passing SOAP messages with attachments using WSIF
SOAP messages with attachments - Passing attachments to WSIF
SOAP messages with attachments - Working with types and type mappings

 

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