SOAP Attachments

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Some SOAP requests/responses might need to send/receive binary data like images, files etc. This will add to the payload and will become very difficult to parse. The solution to this problem is SOAP attachments. These attachment references like URL’s are embedded in a SOAP message and are downloaded by the receiver/sender separately. This drastically decreases the payload to be parsed by the XML parser.

Given below is one of the ways the attachments can be embedded

<SOAP:Body>
..
<productImage href="http://www.abcproducts.com/winerack.JPEG"/>
..
</SOAP:Body>

One of the simplest forms is given in the above XML. There are various other formats for message attachments.

This technology is drawn from the Multipart messaging technique used in SMTP protocol.

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