@href: HTTP request body as an external file

  Hi,

  If I am right, for now, if one wants to send the content of
a file as an HTTP request's body, she has to read the content
as an xs:base64Binary, and copy it into the c:request element
to be passed to the p:http-request step.

  But I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to allow to specify
an external source for the body content.  XML does not copy
very well with binary data, and there is no point to read the
data once, then to copy it to an XML document, to finaly
serialize it to the HTTP wire.

  Couldn't we just add an "href" attribute to c:body?

  For a use case, you can think about the Google Documents
List Data API <http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/>
(if you want to guess what I will talk about at Prague ;-p)
using which you can upload a document to the Google Documents
service.  The request is (could be among others) a multipart
POST where one part is an Atom entry XML document describing
meta information and one part is the document itself.  I can
imagine a pipeline that takes a filename as input, computes
some meta information and send them with the file content to
the server (the document can be for instance a binary MS
Excel spreadsheet.)

  Regards,

-- 
Florent Georges
http://www.fgeorges.org/

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2009 20:00:31 UTC