How to PUT binary data with REST?
February 25, 2008 by Stephan Schmidt
Base64 in XML? Multi-mime? See the question, add a comment if you have an answer, the Google results are not very satisfying. Someone clearly solved the problem. But all REST discussions I’ve found do not adress the problem. Even the “RESTful Web Services” bible is mostly silent on the topic (And I don’t want to declare the binary object a resource and PUT binary data into it).
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As co-author of the “bible” I respectfully ask you to reconsider “declare the binary object a resource and PUT binary data into it.” Look at what AtomPub does (specifically, look at pages 279-280 of RWS; I don’t like the way RFC 5023 explains it). An AtomPub member can have two representations: an Atom entry containing metadata, and a binary document containing data. They’re different representations of a single resource, served from different URLs.
The fact that you need two media types is usually a sign that you’ve either got two resources or two different representations of a resource. If this doesn’t work for whatever reason, I’d probably go with MIME multipart.