SOAP carrying Attachments

Well, it is very simple. I am using IBM WebSphere v5.1, and it uses Axis, so this should work well with Apache-Axis also.

Getting directly to the point:
A simple java class, which we will expose as a web service:
Method is:

public DataHandler getFileAttachment(String fileName) throws Exception
{
DataSource src = new FileDataSource(fileName);
DataHandler result = new DataHandler(src);
return result;
}

That's it. DataHandler, DataSource and FileDataSource are from javax.activation package.

Just expose this as a WebService and you are all set to receive files from a Web Service, as an attachment to the SOAP message.
A sincere advice, never use byte[] getFile() as a Web Service method, even for a small file, it takes so much time, transferring one byte at a time.

Enjoy!