Question

What is the best way to create a webservice for accepting an image. The image might be quite big and I do not want to change the default receive size for the web application. I have written one that accepts a binary image but that I feel that there has to be a better alternative.

Answer 1

Where does this image ‘live?’ Is it accessible in the local file system or on the web? If so, I would suggest having your WebService accepting a URI (can be a URL or a local file) and opening it as a Stream, then using a StreamReader to read the contents of it.

Example (but wrap the exceptions in FaultExceptions, and add FaultContractAttributes):

using System.Drawing; using System.IO; using System.Net; using System.Net.Sockets;  [OperationContract] public void FetchImage(Uri url) {     // Validate url      if (url == null)     {         throw new ArgumentNullException(url);     }      // If the service doesn't know how to resolve relative URI paths      /*if (!uri.IsAbsoluteUri)     {         throw new ArgumentException('Must be absolute.', url);     }*/      // Download and load the image      Image image = new Func<Bitmap>(() =>     {         try         {             using (WebClient downloader = new WebClient())             {                 return new Bitmap(downloader.OpenRead(url));             }         }         catch (ArgumentException exception)         {             throw new ResourceNotImageException(url, exception);         }         catch (WebException exception)         {             throw new ImageDownloadFailedException(url, exception);         }          // IOException and SocketException are not wrapped by WebException :(                      catch (IOException exception)         {             throw new ImageDownloadFailedException(url, exception);         }         catch (SocketException exception)         {             throw new ImageDownloadFailedException(url, exception);         }     })();      // Do something with image  }