Using Metro, adding a MTOMFeature to client side causes a MIMEParsingException, why?

Question

We have an MTOM-enabled web service that is published with Grails and the Metro 1.0.2 plugin:

@MTOM
@WebService(targetNamespace="http://com.domain")
class TestService {

    @WebMethod
    int uploadFile(@XmlMimeType("application/octet-stream")DataHandler data) {

        data.dataSource.inputStream.eachLine {
            println "reading: -> ${it}"
        }
        return 0
    }
}

Following this tutorial, we set up a Java test-client that looks like this

public class Client {

    public static void main(String[] argv) {

        MTOMFeature feat = new MTOMFeature();
        TestService service = new TestServiceService().getTestServicePort(feat);
        Map<String, Object> ctxt = ((BindingProvider)service).getRequestContext();
        ctxt.put(JAXWSProperties.HTTP_CLIENT_STREAMING_CHUNK_SIZE, 8192);
        service.uploadFile(new DataHandler(new FileDataSource("c:/file.xml")));
    }
}

When I run the client, I get the following error message:

Couldn't create SOAP message due to exception: org.jvnet.mimepull.MIMEParsingException: Missing start boundary

However, when I don't add the MTOMFeature, and just do TestService service = new TestServiceService().getTestServicePort(); the files gets uploaded ok. But as I understand it if MTOM is not enabled on both server and client side, the entire file will be kept in memory (and not streamed). So, my questions are

• Why do we get that error?
• If I don't add the MTOMFeature, will the file still be MTOM-transmitted?

I would be very grateful for any help/tips!

Answer 1

After some research and testing, the answers are:

• The error is because grails adds its own filtering, including services. So, by excluding the services from being filtered like this static excludes = ["/services/*"] in UrlMappings.groovy, it works.
• No. Without the MTOMFeature the file will just be treated as any other data in the request. That means being stored in the memory, thus causing problems for big files.