Rob Chartier ~ Contemplation...

Are you able to just use a .NET component on the client (obviously wrapped to use from COM)? If you could it's save a whole lot of hassle...

Nah, we cant deploy .NET on the client machines just yet (they are a few hundred machines spread out over north america with a current deployment of VB6, SOAP Toolkit v3). We are actually starting to plan on making the move to an exclusive .NET environment, but Im afraid that wont be for a little while yet.

Why are you trying to send the base64 encoded date as a byte[]? I thought the whole point of base64 encoding was that it ended up as a string. I have a project (admittedly it's .NET to .NET) which sends potentially non-text data to a remote server. It just encodes the data as a base64 encoded string and passes that string as a parameter to the service.

On the client and the server I attempted to treat both instances of the variable as an array of bytes. Now of course when it goes over the wire i had to do something along the lines of:

(VB6)

dim token() as byte

Call encoding.EncodeB64(token, output)
Elm.dataType = "bin.base64"
Elm.nodeTypedValue = output
Dom0.documentElement.appendChild Elm

which essentiall produces the xml for my request:

<Token xmlns:dt="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:datatypes" dt:dt="bin.base64">TWVLazJCY1BTa.....</Token>


And then on the server I do get the encoded string into my byte[] which works ok, for the first half of the bytes in the array. The second half is usually way off. Single and Dual byte codes are not an issue, transport not an issue. The arrays are of the same length, it just seems that some of the actual bytes are getting mangled somehow. God only knows why.

Im basically convinced that the To/From Base64 encode is not being handle correctly (maybe the POS library that im using on the client or even the server).

Bottom line, all of this work to get something that is seemingly simple isnt worth it. Ive already rolled out an alternative acceptable solution.

Why don't you send them using DIME and WS-Attachments instead of inserting them inside the XML stream? Both SOAP Toolkit 3.0 and WSE 1.0/2.0 supports those protocols.
Only my two cents...

Well the actual data is very small, only about 100bytes in length and that IMHO DIME would probably overkill (not to mention a real bitch for VB) for implementation.

On yeah, Don Box mentioned that we should avoid DIME a while back. ugh.

Rob, see if this is what you want to achieve:

http://www.PerfectXML.com/XMLAnswers1203.asp#3

Well, Today is Saturday June 4th, 2006.  I'm going to help a friend call a Web Service from VB6 thanks to you guys. :)  At least I got him to upgrade his web server to have .NET :)