Attaching files to WCF REST service responses
- by David Seiler
I have a resource that looks something like this:
/users/{id}/summary?format={format}
When format is "xml" or "json" I respond with a user summary object that gets automagically encoded by WCF - fine so far. But when format equals "pdf", I want my response to consist of a trivial HTTP response body and a PDF file attachment.
How is this done? Hacking on WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse doesn't seem to work, and wouldn't be the right thing even if it did. Including the bits of the file in a CDATA section or something in the response isn't safe. Should I create a subclass of Message, then provide a custom IDispatchMessageFormatter that responds with it? I went a short distance down that path but ultimately found the documentation opaque.
What's the right thing?
