Currently developing a client portal site for clients to upload reports and share with their principals and stuff so I decided to learn some new stuff while I was about it. I have developed the portal using MVC (Model-View-Controller) and have to say it’s excellent, steep learning curve and the tools aren’t quite there yet but once you get going, creating new models and adding new views to those models is a breeze.

I’m fairly familiar with DJango (python MVC like framework) so I had a bit of a headstart. So, one of the things we need to do here is allow clients who are running our desktop application to upload reports they have created to different secured areas of the site. I wanted this to be as simple as possible and it needed to support very large files so I decided that the best bet was to stick a big button in the report viewer screen of our console labelled “Publish”, let the user whack that and start a background thread to asyncronously upload the file and let the user get on with their facebooking, notifying them once it’s been done.

This sounded much better than sticking an upload page somewhere on the site, as then the user would have to export the report from the console, fire up a browser, navigiate to the file and so on. I decided that using WCF sounded like the right thing to do here to accept the file from the console. 3 days later and I’ve only just got the file transfer working now, so I’m gonna blog my steps so I don’t forget and to add some helpful messages to google.

Error 1:

 Content Type multipart/related; type=\"application/xop+xml\"; start=\"\"; boundary=\"uuid:3ad7b705-4f19-4c84-b700-8878fbead215+id=1\"; start-info=\"text/xml\" was not supported by service http:///.svc. The client and service bindings may be mismatched

Error 2:

System.ServiceModel.ProtocolException: The remote server returned an unexpected response: (400) Bad Request. System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.

There were loads of other errors, but these where the 2 that really wrecked my head. I could transfer simple strings easily but not large streams (such as files) and no matter what I did to web.config I kept on getting the above 2 errors. They turn out to be down to the fact that the WCF service’s web.config and the desktop applications app.config are very heavily reliant on matching up exactly with each other. For the first day at this nothing I did would make a difference, turns out that even though the part of the desktop application that calls the WCF Service is in an external dll, it is still the Application’s app.config I need to change. I has assumed that because the service reference was in the dll, then the config should be here, not so! Anyhoo, onto the victory, I can’t really remember the steps that got me here, so I’ll just post my config

//Server Side – Interface

namespace IntelliWeb.Services {
[ServiceContract]
public interface IFileTransferService {
[OperationContract]
string UploadStream(System.IO.Stream stream);

[OperationContract]
string SetUploadDetails(string szGuid, int nClient, string szReportType, string szReportTitle);

}
}

//Server Side = web.config

<system.web> <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="2097151"/>  <system.serviceModel>
<bindings>
<basicHttpBinding>
<binding name="Obscured.Services.FileTransferService.FileTransfer" transferMode="StreamedRequest"
maxBufferSize="65536" maxReceivedMessageSize="2000000000" messageEncoding="Mtom" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" />
</basicHttpBinding>
</bindings>
<services>
<service behaviorConfiguration="Obscured.Services.FileTransferServiceBehavior" name="Obscured.Services.FileTransferService">
<endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="IntelliWeb.Services.IFileTransferService" bindingConfiguration="Obscured.Services.FileTransferService.FileTransfer">
<identity>
<dns value="localhost" />
</identity>
</endpoint>
<endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
</service>
</services>
<behaviors>
<serviceBehaviors>
<behavior name="Obscured.Services.FileTransferServiceBehavior">
<serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
<serviceDebug httpHelpPageEnabled="true"
httpsHelpPageEnabled="true"
httpsHelpPageUrl="Uri"
includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true"/>
</behavior>
</serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>
</system.serviceModel>

//client side – app.config

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<system.serviceModel>
<bindings>
<basicHttpBinding>
<binding name="BasicHttpBinding_IFileTransfer" transferMode="StreamedRequest"
maxBufferSize="65536" maxReceivedMessageSize="2000000000" messageEncoding="Mtom" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" />
</basicHttpBinding>
</bindings>
<client>
<endpoint address="http://obscured.domain.com/ClientService.svc"
binding="basicHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_IFileTransfer"
contract="IWS.IClientService" name="BasicHttpBinding_IFileTransfer">
<identity>
<dns value="localhost" />
</identity>
</endpoint>
</client>
</system.serviceModel>
</configuration>

That should be enough to transfer up to 2 Gb of data using WCF streaming. Next challenge is to get this working using Vipul Modi’s Dynamic Proxy. Should be a laugh!
<edit>
Got it working using Dynamic Proxy in about 5 mins – go figure. I assumed it would be a nightmare because as far as I’m aware Dynamic Proxy doesn’t read the app.config. Perhaps it does, I’ll have a look when my head settles down
</edit>