Streaming a file from WCF service

Question

I am trying to figure out how to stream a file (typically a PDF) from a web service that is front ended by a typical web site. The PDFs do not physically exist, but are created on the fly by a report generator (think Crystal, Telerik Reporting, etc.)

I can do this today directly from the web site by doing a Response.Clear() followed by setting the ContentType and adding the appropriate Content-Disposition header finally followed up by a Response.BinaryWrite(...) .

But, a WCF service (IIS hosted in this case), does not have a Response object. I have tried passing in the Response object from my web page as a parameter, but I can't even start the WCF Service because HttpResponse cannot be serialized.

Am I barking up the wrong tree? Is there a better way of looking at this? We wanted it in a common web service because more of our web sites are needing to do this and we don't want to maintain multiple copies of the code to do it.

Answer 1

You can send your file as byte[] array.

Or you can send this file as a Stream parameter (using Streamed mode)