Attachment confusion...

[Douglas Bitting <Do...@agile.com>]

Hi.

Forgive me if this has already been asked and answered.  I looked through the archives, but could not find what I was looking for.  I'm kinda new to
all this, so forgive me if this is a silly question.

I'm looking at the attachments example, and I'm wondering about the generated WSDL (i.e., the WSDL received when looking at
http://host/services/urn:EchoAttachmentService?wsdl).  Can someone help me understand how this WSDL would allow someone to understand that an
attachment is expected as a request parameter and as the response?  Shouldn't <mime:multipartRelated> be included in the <wsdl:binding> element?  As a
related question, how would someone determine what the request/response types are from this WSDL?  It seems like this WSDL assumes that both client
and server implicitly understand what a tns1:DataHandler is.

Basically, I'm trying to understand how I can write web services that accept Files/InputStreams (i.e., DataHandlers) or respond with File objects.  I
don't want to be required to generate the client side stubs because I don't want to limit what environments (e.g., Java, Perl, etc.) can be used to
access these services.  Furthermore, I don't particularly want to be required to document what kind of custom serializers/deserializers are needed
unless it's absolutely necessary.  The JAXRPC spec, for example, seems to state that JAXRPC will take care of serialization issues to/from
DataHandlers (see Section 7).  Am I taking the wrong approach here by trying to use SOAP 1.1 w/ Attachments?  Should I just return file objects as
Base64 strings and allow the client to do what they want with it?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Cheers,
--Doug