SOAP messages with attachments - Writing the WSDL extensions

 

Example

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.

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Related Tasks

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

 

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