Question

I want to upload a file using windows application to a web service so that web service can process the file.

Please tell me how can i achieve this.

I only know that i can use web service with windows forms to send only string, int, these types. But what about file.

Any help is appreciated

Answer 1

As Will Wu said you can always declare a web method that takes a byte[] as input in your web service, but if you don’t like to send the byte array as it is in your web service call, you can always encode the byte[] to a base64 string from your client and decode the byte[] on the server side

Example

WebService sample web Method

    [WebMethod]
    public bool UploadFile(string fileName, string uploadFileAsBase64String)
    {
        try
        {
            byte[] fileContent = Convert.FromBase64String(uploadFileAsBase64String);

            string filePath = "UploadedFiles\\" + fileName;
            System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes(filePath, fileContent);
            return true;
        }
        catch (Exception)
        {
            return false;
        }
    }

Client Side Base64 string generation

    public string ConvertFileToBase64String(string fileName)
    {
        byte[] fileContent = System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes(fileName);
        return Convert.ToBase64String(fileContent);
    }

use the above method to convert your file to a string and send it to the web service as a string instead of byte array