IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Defining and transforming data > Create and mapping interfaces > Create interfaces
Use document binding style with multipart messages
Multipart messages used with the document binding style require some knowledge of the WS-I standard.
These sections explain how to use the document binding style with multipart messages:
- Document binding style and the WS-I Basic Profile
- Multipart messages used with exports
- Multipart messages used with imports
- Recommended way of working with multipart messages
Document binding style and the WS-I Basic Profile
The Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) organization
has defined a set of rules regarding how web services should be described
in Web Services Description Language (WSDL). It has also defined how the corresponding SOAP messages should be formed, in order to ensure interoperability. These rules are specified in the 
WS-I Basic Profile.
For a document style SOAP binding, the WS-I profile conformance requires that in a WSDL document, for an operation that uses the document style, only a single message part is ever bound to the SOAP body, and that the SOAP message corresponding to this message part contains a single child element matching the part that was so bound.
This means that when using a document style SOAP binding for an operation whose messages (input, output or fault) are defined with multiple parts, only one of those parts should be bound to the SOAP body in order to be compliant with the WS-I Basic Profile 1.1.
Multipart messages used with exports
The following approach is used when WSDL descriptions are generated for exports with web service (JAX-WS and JAX-RPC) bindings in this case:
- The first message part is bound to the SOAP body
- For the JAX-WS binding, all other message parts of type hexBinary or base64Binary are bound as referenced attachments.
- All other message parts are bound as SOAP headers
Multipart messages used with imports
The JAX-RPC and JAX-WS import bindings will honour the SOAP binding in an existing WSDL document with multi-part document style messages even if the SOAP binding does bind multiple parts to the SOAP body. However you will not be able to generate web service clients for such WSDL documents in IBM Integration Designer (note that the JAX-RPC binding does not support attachments in any case).
Recommended way of working with multipart messages
The recommended way of working with multipart messages with an operation which has a document style SOAP binding is as follows:
- Use the document literal wrapped style. Messages always have a single part, however, attachments may be unreferenced attachments or swaRef-typed attachments.
- You may also use the RPC literal style. In this case there are no restrictions on the WSDL binding in terms of the number of parts bound to the SOAP body. The SOAP message that results always has a single child that represents the operation being invoked, with the message parts being children of that element.
- For the JAX-WS binding, have the first message part be one that is not of type hexBinary or base64Binary, and all other parts be of one of those two types. Then all parts will be bound as attachments.
- Any other cases will be subject to the behavior described above.
Important: When receiving multipart document-style SOAP messages with referenced attachments, the JAX-WS binding expects each referenced attachment to be represented by a SOAP body child element with an href attribute whose value identifies the attachment using its content ID. The JAX-WS binding sends referenced attachments for such messages in the same way. This behavior is not compliant with the WS-I Basic Profile. To ensure that your messages do comply, you need to follow the approach of the first or second points in the list above or avoid the use of referenced attachments for such messages and use unreferenced or swaRef-typed attachments instead.