Mime Attachments (Swa) for Wcf

@YaronNaveh

As we know from the web services attachments matrix, Wcf does not natively support Soap With Attachments (SwA, sometimes referred to as Mime attachments). Fortunately some nice people from Microsoft and SVC GmbH. in Austria have published a proof of concept for a Wcf SwA encoder. It does not have a fancy API yet and you would have to hard code your attachments in the encoder code itself. However it is a great start if you need such an interoperability.

@YaronNaveh

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Web Service Attachments Support Matrix

@YaronNaveh

Many web services require sending or receiving large files. There is an interesting evolution of attachments standards - however today MTOM is the preferred way to do this. Nevertheless not all SOAP stacks support MTOM and in addition some existing services might already employ older techniques. These techniques may include Soap With Attachments (SwA) or WSI attachment profile (SwaRef) MIME attachments or DIME. I have investigated the attachments support of a few known soap stacks: .Net WSE2 & WSE3, WCF, Axis, Axis2, Metro (WSIT), CXF (XFire), gSOAP, SpringWS and JBossWS. The bellow table summarizes the web service attachments support matrix (click to enlarge):



Note: Some of this information I took from the providers web sites which did not always supplied a nice sheet with the list of supported standards. You are encouraged to correct me if I made a mistake.

The conclusion is as expected: MTOM should be used for new web services; If you know you’ll never have .Net clients then you can also use Soap With Attachments (SwA) or WSI attachment profile (SwaRef) MIME attachments; Beware of DIME if you care for I14Y.

@YaronNaveh

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