DIME Attachments and Chunking

[LearninGuru]

Hi,

I have a situation where I need to return bulky PDF files from a web service
method.

The easiest way to do this is return base64 encoded strings. But as the PDF
files are bulky this would mean that for each web method call the file would
have to be loaded into memory for encoding and returning. This will easily
turn out to be a performance bottleneck if multiple calls are being made to
the web method.

A more desirable solution would be to stream the PDF file in chunks of
acceptable sizes. For this I plan to use the WSE support for DIME
Attachements in .Net. Though all documentation on DIME theoritically say
that DIME Attachements can be streamed as chunks, the .Net implementation of
this in the form of DimeAttachment class in the namespace
Microsoft.Web.S ervices2 doesn't support streaming. This is clearly
documented in the supporting document where it is said that due to the
limitation of http all DIME data is buffered in memory before returning as a
single response to the caller. Though there is a 'ChunkSize' property in
this class it is documented that this propert only affects the DIME record
size and is not used for streaming.

My questions are:

1. Is there a way to stream DIME attachements using WSE in .Net?
2. What are the other mechanisms that can be used to stream data to the
caller?

Thanks in advance.
LG