DIME Chunking

[Marc Dumontier <mr...@blueprint.org>]

Hi,

I was wondering if AXIS plans to support sending DIME attachements using 
DIME streaming (record chunking).

Our webservice deals with large amounts of data. We currently have DIME 
attachments implemented by streaming out to a temporary file
and then a FileDataSource is created and that's picked up through a 
DataHandler by the AXIS framework.

Ideally, Axis should support streaming back attachments, so that I could 
use a datasource with a PipedInputStream or something connected to my 
Exporter.

Currently it looks like AXIS makes 2 calls to getInputStream() of a 
Custom datasource for DIME. The 1st time is  to get the length of the  
data, and the second time is to actually get the data. Under this 
current model, it is impossible to implement full streaming, since I 
can't possibly know the size of the data without running my export.

Looking at the DIME specification, it looks like DIME was designed so that

"Encapsulating documents and entities initially of unknown size. This 
capability can be used to encapsulate dynamically
generated content or very large entities as a series of  chunks. "

This is done by using DIME record chunks..basically have a header for 
each buffer, and the set of all chunks is your message.

Does AXIS have any plans to support this part of the DIME specification?


DIME Specification
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnglobspec/html/dimeindex.asp

Marc Dumontier