SOAP does not support bi -directional communications ??

["Awasthi, Anand" <An...@bmc.com>]

Hi,


SOAP Spec says that SOAP does not support bi -directional communications. 
Couls some provide me more explaination over this statement ??


thanks a lot 
Anand


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Wail [mailto:simon.wail@comview.com]
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 5:00 PM
To: soap-user@xml.apache.org
Subject: RPC calls with attachments



I'm trying to write a SOAP client/server application to transfer large
files. 
I want to avoid base64 encoding due to the size of the files (many MBs).  I
noticed the current Apache SOAP implementation (V2.0) supports wrapping SOAP
RPC calls in MIME encoded messages (see the mime sample code).

My question is if I build my SOAP RPC call with an array of file names as a
parameter, and then add each file as an attachment with the "addBodyPart()"
method, is there any way for the server side to access the attachments.
From
my searching of the toolkit, it seems only the array of file names is passed
to
the server side method and there seems no way to access the SOAP message, in
particular the SOAPContext object which would then allow access to the
attachments.  This might be the way the RPC mechanism is designed, i.e hide
all
the SOAP stuff from the programmer, but in my case I'd like some way to
access
the underlying SOAP message.  Maybe there is a way the SOAP context can be
passed as a parameter to the server side method, or some static method that
returns the context (probably quite hard to implement).

Alternatively should I just follow the other part of the MIME sample code
where
each file is added as a "DataHandler" object to an array and then just let
the
underlying toolkit code convert the data to attachments.  While this hides
all
the complexity of the MIME encoding from the programmer, I might need more
control over the MIME encoding for my purposes.

Any help will be greatly appreciated,
Simon,
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