Can a web service return a stream?

Question

I\'ve been writing a little application that will let people upload & download files to me. I\'ve added a web service to this applciation to provide the upload/download fun

Answer 1

When you use a standardized web service the sender and reciever do rely on the integrity of the XML data send from the one to the other. This means that a web service request and answer only are complete when the last tag was sent. Having this in mind, a web service cannot be treated as a stream.

This is logical because standardized web services do rely on the http-protocol. That one is "stateless", will say it works like "open connection ... send request ... receive data ... close request". The connection will be closed at the end, anyway. So something like streaming is not intended to be used here. Or he layers above http (like web services).

So sorry, but as far as I can see there is no possibility for streaming in web services. Even worse: depending on the implementation/configuration of a web service, byte[] - data may be translated to Base64 and not the CDATA-tag and the request might get even more bloated.

P.S.: Yup, as others wrote, "chuinking" is possible. But this is no streaming as such ;-) - anyway, it may help you.