WCF 4 REST - Acquiring the underlying response str

Question

Background: I am currently using the Visual Studio 2010 online template "WCF REST Service Template 40(CS)" and it works great for my primarily JSON based service. I've even got it working to return a stream when returning an image.

Scenario: I am currently looking into the server push & multipart/x-mixed-replace technology to replace the polling for images method I am currently using.

The Problem: The issue I am facing is that I am unable to find a way to get the underlying response stream for a REST request, I know the the template is trying to help by abstracting this away from me, but in order to implement the multipart/x-mixed-replace mechanism properly i will need to write directly to this stream and have full control of what i write to the client.

Any help would be much appreciated. The server push tech seems so cool!

Answer 1

I have returned all sorts of things in the response, including documents, spreadsheets etc. It looks something like this:

[ServiceContract]
public class MyService
{
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate="{id}")]
    public Stream GetDocuments(int id)
    {
       WebOperationContext.Current.OutgoingResponse.ContentType = GetContentType();
       Stream result = CreateTemporaryStream();
       /* Write your data in the correct format */
       return result; 
    }  
}

You can pretty much return any format you wish. The client obviously have to be able to parse the stream and extract the individual streams from the response.