I have been able to use streaming and to pass the parameters I needed once I switched to using Message Contracts. It’s not that much more work to do than plain DataContracts.

I need to transfer big files from client to service and back. On the service side I need to store it in DB. For this purposes I use ORM that maps varbinary(MAX) to byte[]. So it seems good to transfer files like byte[], but AFAIK, the best way for sending big files is streaming. But when I use stream I can’t get it’s length (throws exception) and as result I can’t convert it to byte[]. Maybe you can suggest something.

Thanks in advance.

have you tried the approach you outlined? What errors did you get?

I guess you are not interested in trying streaming since there are limitations on what the DataContract can be in this case, as highlighted at the top of my post.

Thank you for your articale!

Why I can’t just simply use the following construction to transfer files:

[DataContract]
public class UserDataFile
{

private FileStream _toStore;
private int _groupId;

public UserDataFile(FileStream stream, int groupId)
{
ToStore = stream;
GroupId = groupId;

}

[DataMember]
public FileStream ToStore
{
get { return _toStore; }
set { _toStore = value; }
}

[DataMember]
public int GroupId
{
get { return _groupId; }
set { _groupId = value; }
}

have you looked at http://stefanoricciardi.com/2009/10/02/file-transfer-with-wcf-part-ii/ ? There you can find a scheleton of the server implementation.

Could you please provide me the code file for File Upload Service. I would like to test it out and see..

Thanks.

Pathmini

unfortunately I cannot share the whole source code without violating the intellectual property of my company. I’ll try to post a scheleton implementation of the UploadFile and Download file as soon as possible.