Question

I looked through existing questions but could not find exact match. Maybe I’m missing something obvious, if so – please direct me in the proper place. Here is my problem:

I have ExtJs front and application that needs to upload binary data to the WCF back end. On the front end I have the following code (I use Ext.form.field.File control to let user select a file)

// Create a dummy form in the controller after user selected a file
var form = Ext.create('Ext.form.Panel', {
  items: [ my_file_field ]
});

form.getForm().submit({
  method: 'POST',
  url: 'myservice.url',
  ...
});

On the backend I have the following contract:

namespace MyApp
{
    [ServiceContract]
    public interface ITransferService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [WebInvoke(UriTemplate = "UploadImage", Method = "POST")]
        void SaveImage(Stream buffer);
    }

}

It works ‘fine’ except one little thing: in the stream inside SaveImage() I get not only binary data from the file user selected but also bunch of headers and encoded fields:

------WebKitFormBoundary26wAkvwGTnAMELFM
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="ext-gen1654"; filename="photo.png"
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
..... binary data goes here .... 
------WebKitFormBoundary26wAkvwGTnAMELFM--

What am I missing? How do I change the contract of the service so I get clean binary data?

Answer 1

I found this post: http://antscode.blogspot.com/2009/11/parsing-multipart-form-data-in-wcf.html

Does anybody know more simple solution? Not that proposed parsing logic is complicated, but I was under impression that this is a common task and there are should be easier way of doing it. I can’t believe MSFT doesn’t understand standard web pages POSTs in the WCF out-of-the-box…