Sending attachments with SOAP messages using soapUI

Attachments are one of the important aspects of any message transmission facility. Attachments are commonly used in transport mechanisms such as MAIL (for example, SMTP) where the attachments are included as part of the mail message. In all our examples which we have discussed so far, the payload of SOAP messages represented simple XML elements with primitive data types. However, in the real world, we do not just transmit raw XML through SOAP messages. SOAP messages are transmitted along with images, PDF documents, or some other binary data. There are multiple approaches used to send attachments with SOAP messages:

• Base64 encoding: Data is embedded as an element or attribute value inside the payload of the SOAP message using Base64 encoding. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64).

  For example:

  <x:data xmlns:x="http://test.data.com" >
    <image>/ayQKWWWa=</image>
  </x:data>

  Because of its inefficiency and performance...