Download file from webservice - in ASP.NET site

Question

I want to push a file to the browser from a website using a webservice. I\'m currently reading the file into a base64 byte array, and returning that from the webservice. This w

Answer 1

Its usually a bad idea to embed a file in a web service. You just add overhead and complexity with no real benefit.

Instead you should provide a IHttpHandler to handle the file upload. Most web servers also provide helper API's to simplify this, e.g. in ASP.NET you can access the uploaded file with:

HttpContext.Request.Files[0]

There are plenty of javascript file upload scripts that simplify this on the client: http://www.phpletter.com/Demo/AjaxFileUpload-Demo/