Missing start boundary on messages with attachments

[barsimp47]

I'm attempting to send a SOAP message with an attachment, using WebServiceMessageCallback to add the attachment like so:

WebServiceMessageCallback requestCallback = new WebServiceMessageCallback() {
  public void doWithMessage(WebServiceMessage message)
      throws IOException, TransformerException {
    
    SoapMessage soapMessage = (SoapMessage) message;
    
    // Put the XMLObject for the request body into the SOAP body.
    SoapBody soapBody = soapMessage.getSoapBody();
    Transformer transformer = MyClient.this.transformerFactory.newTransformer();
    transformer.transform(new StreamSource(myBodyDocument.newReader(xmlOptions)), 
        soapBody.getPayloadResult());
    
    // Add the XMLObject MyHeader to the SOAP header.
    SoapHeader soapHeader = soapMessage.getSoapHeader();
    transformer = MyClient.this.transformerFactory.newTransformer();
    transformer.transform(new StreamSource(myHeaderDocument.newReader(xmlOptions)), 
        soapHeader.getResult());
    
    soapMessage.addAttachment(
        generateContentId("ReceiptsAttachment"), // Content-ID 
        new ByteArrayResource(attachmentData),   // Data
        "application/octet-stream");        // Content-Type
  }
}; 

serviceTemplate.sendAndReceive(
  "https://foo.bar.com/SendSubmissionReceipts", 
  requestCallback, responseExtractor);

But I get a fault response back with a faultstring "Decoding of request failed: Missing start boundary" and an HTTP response code "HTTP/1.1 415 Unsupported Media Type". And sure enough, when I examine the message that I sent, the Content-Type was the correct "multipart/related", and a mime boundary value was declared, but the HTTP message body doesn't use the MIME boundary before the XML part, and the attachment part isn't even present. Case in point:

Accept-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary=MIMEBoundaryurn_uuid_3D927F4433B32F68641210953465313; type="text/xml"; start="0.urn:uuid:3D927F4433B32F68641210953465314@apache.org"; charset="UTF-8"
SOAPAction: ""
User-Agent: Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1
Host: foo.bar.com
Cookie: $Version=0; JSESSIONID=0001JGVZICF0ATPGIDRKW5J1LHY:11p9fo6l7; $Path=/
Content-Length: 3978

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><soapenv:Header>[contents intentionally omitted]</soapenv:Header><soapenv:Body>[contents intentionally omitted]</soapenv:Body></soapenv:Envelope>

I've set some breakpoints to see if my attachment byte array is null or something, but it appears to be ok.

Any idea why the HTTP request is incorrect? Am I adding the attachment correctly and at the correct point in the message creation process? Should I use a ClientInterceptor to add the attachment instead? Suppose I'll try that next....

Spring 2.5.2
Spring-WS 1.5.1
CommonsHttpMessageSender
AxiomSoapMessageFactory
Java 5

[barsimp47]

Just tried the same thing inside the handleRequest() of a ClientInterceptor, but I got the same bad results.

[barsimp47]

After stepping through the code starting with WebServiceTemplate.sendAndReceive() and digging down through to the HttpClient calls, it appears that the CommonsHttpMessageSender is returning a connection that uses a org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.PostMethod instead of a org.apache.commons.httpclient.methods.MultipartPos tMethod.

Can someone tell me how to configure the message sender to return connections with a MultipartPostMethod?

[barsimp47]

Upon further investigation, it appears that Commons Http's MultipartPostMethod is deprecated in favor of setting the PostMethod's request entity to a MultipartRequestEntity. The only place I can find Spring-WS calling PostMethod.setRequestEntity is in CommonsHttpConnection.onSendAfterWrite() where it uses a ByteArrayRequestEntity, which apparently doesn't create the HTTP parts correctly (at all).

protected void onSendAfterWrite(WebServiceMessage message) throws IOException {
  postMethod.setRequestEntity(new ByteArrayRequestEntity(requestBuffer.toByteArray()));
  requestBuffer = null;
  httpClient.executeMethod(postMethod);
}

It would seem to me that onSendAfterWrite() should be checking the WebServiceMessage to see if there are any attachments, and if there are, creating the necessary Parts and passing them to a MultipartRequestEntity instead of sending the entire request to a ByteArrayRequestEntity.

I suppose I should post this as a bug in Jira unless someone speaks up to show me the correct way to make this work.