Sending Large Amounts of Data in a SOAP Message Using WSE

WSE 3.0 supports the Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM) specification for sending large amounts of data in a SOAP message.

Overview of MTOM support

Using MTOM enables an application to send or receive a large amount of data, such as a large file of text or binary data, and use the security features in WSE. Previous versions of WSE used the Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) protocol to send a large amount of data as an attachment, but that attachment could not be secured without using transport-level security. WSE 3.0 provides support for the MTOM protocol, which allows message-level security to be applied to the whole message, including binary data.

When WSE MTOM encodes a SOAP message, most of the message is transmitted as XML in textual form, but large blocks of binary data are optimized by transmitting them as-is, without conversion to text. When the SOAP message contains binary data and it is not digitally signed, this provides a performance improvement over protocols that require the binary data to be converted to XML.

The MTOM encoding allows the whole SOAP message, including the binary data, to be digitally signed. When the SOAP message is digitally signed, the binary data is converted to text to compute the digital signature. WSE transmits the digital signature and the binary data for the MTOM-encoded SOAP message over the wire. Any Web service or Web service client that complies with MTOM can understand this form of encoding.

For detailed steps on how to send large amounts of data using MTOM, see How to: Enable a Web Service to Send and Receive Large Amounts of Data.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Enable a Web Service to Send and Receive Large Amounts of Data