Attachment files in client code -- best way to convert

[Mark Mueller <ma...@yahoo.com>]

Hi, 

I'm developing a service that returns an audio/x-wav
file as an attachment.  The simplest handling from the
attachments sample uses a DataHandler return value
type.  I didn't like having: 
type="apachesoap:DataHandler" in my WSDL because I
figured that non-Java clients would not necessarily
know how to deal with it.

I found that if I used "anyType" as the return value
type in the Message section of the WSDL, and described
the return value as a mime part in the binding section
-- like this: <mime:content part="wavFile"
type="application/octet-stream"/>  -- then WSDL2Java
would convert the attachment file to an Object.

This seems fine for my purpose, but I got to wondering
-- what if the attached file were gigantic?  I imagine
that a DataHandler object doesn't attempt to keep its
content in memory, but what about an attachment file
converted to a java.lang.Object?  Is Object somehow
designed to handle the possibility that its content
might be very large, or is it an inefficient way to
handle a potentially large file?

   Mark



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