Sending binary data contained within a map?

[Tom Oinn <tm...@ebi.ac.uk>]

Hi all,

This may be a simple question, if so I'd be delighted... I have a web 
service that returns results wrapped up in a Map, all well and good, it 
works just fine. The current problem I'm having is that say my service 
needs to return some binary data, it puts a byte array into the Map, and 
this is then not unreasonably turned into a soap array of type xsd:byte. 
Unfortunately, this means that my byte array bloats by about a factor of 
thirty, which is an overhead I can't really afford.

So, what I'd like to see on the wire would be a base64 encoded binary 
type, but I can't see how to persuade axis to do this, can anyone help? 
I guess what I'd ideally like is something like a java type that, when I 
put it into my Map, causes a base64 string to be used in the soap 
representation.

Cheers,

Tom (this question is on behalf of a colleague who is currently away, I 
have to deal with the output of the service and currently the xml format 
of doom is crashing my servers with out of memory errors...)