Access Gateway extends the WebSphere® ESB platform to provide SOAP attachment support. The extension enables the Access Gateway to maintain the SOAP attachment data instead of discarding it.
IBM® WebSphere Telecom Web Services Server (TWSS) provides APIs to access and process SOAP attachments within mediation primitives and the ability to propagate attachments through Service Component Architecture Web service imports.
TWSS is optimized for SOAP attachments that are relatively small, ranging from 50 to 500 KB and averaging 150 to 300 KB. This allows the implementation to treat attachments as messages instead of streams.
If you anticipate having to handle larger attachments, you can avoid performance problems by enabling the Access Gateway to process SOAP attachments in memory, rather than using disk I/O operations. For details, see the topic Configuring additional settings for the Access Gateway.