Previously, I discussed how I worked around a firewall issue where the HTTPS port was re-mapped, and the return URL was different than the request URL as a result of that remapping. So I trudged on, and hit a real stumper. Here’s the new issue:

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish secure channel for SSL/TLS. Inner Exception: The function completed successfully, but must be called again to complete the context

I ran across Jan Tielen’s blog post (http://weblogs.asp.net/jan/archive/2004/05/08/128394.aspx) where he provided a code snippet to override the GetWebRequest method in the Reference.cs file. I implemented it, and it worked great --- on my development machine! However, when rolled out to the same test environment, the problem remained. However, I modified it futher, and got it to work..

/// <summary>

/// Set web request properties here

/// </summary>

/// <param name="uri">uri </param>

/// <returns></returns>

protected override System.Net.WebRequest GetWebRequest(System.Uri uri)

{

   System.Net.HttpWebRequest webRequest = (System.Net.HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);

   webRequest.AllowWriteStreamBuffering = true;

   webRequest.KeepAlive = false;

   return webRequest;

}

Sort of. When I tried to use DIME with the above code, it gave me an error “Client found response content type of '', but expected 'text/xml'”. That was not going to work. I found some more code, and it seemed to work great once again, until I tried to make a DIME call. Here was that attempt.

protected override System.Net.WebRequest GetWebRequest(System.Uri uri)

{

     WebRequest request = base.GetWebRequest(uri); ;

     if (requestPropertyInfo==null)

         requestPropertyInfo = request.GetType().GetProperty("Request");

     HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)requestPropertyInfo.GetValue(request,null);

     webRequest.KeepAlive = false;

     webRequest.ProtocolVersion = System.Net.HttpVersion.Version10;

     return request;

}

Once again, it worked fine during my WSE calls, but failed when trying to use DIME attachments with the following error:  found response content 'application/dime', but expected 'text/xml'

To save any readers some time, I will go through everything I tried to resolve the problem, and finally, how I ended up resolving it. Here’s the items which didn’t work:

-- tried setting the SoapActor

-- tried turning off the Document protocol

-- tried setting the request and return URI

-- tried overding the GetWebRequest function a few different ways

-- tried using wsdl instead of asmx in setting up the Web Reference

-- tried setting the URI target/destination seperately

-- moved web service to the same machine as the calling web site (but still had to make an external call)

-- turned on tracing input and output and analyzed the logs created by WSE 2.0

So what finally worked? I ended up abandoning DIME, and encoded the file as a string, and passed it as an element of my XML. Here’s the code to encode the file as a string.

/// <summary>

/// Encodes the file in a Base64 string format.

/// </summary>

/// <param name="file">Name of the file.</param>

/// <returns></returns>

private string EncodeFile(HtmlInputFile file)

{

      try

      {

            if (file.PostedFile.ContentLength > 0)

            {

                  byte[] fsBytes = new byte[file.PostedFile.ContentLength];

            System.IO.Stream fileStream = file.PostedFile.InputStream;

            fileStream.Read(fsBytes, 0, file.PostedFile.ContentLength);

            return Convert.ToBase64String(fsBytes);

            }

            else

                  return String.Empty;

      }

      catch (Exception ex)

      {

            //Handle the Error

            return String.Empty;

      }

}

What a trip it was to get there, but the resulting service has performed well, and I don’t have the issues I had with DIME. Don’t get me wrong, DIME worked great. But deployment of the web service in a secure environment proved to be quite a challenge. If you need more detail in resolving your issue, feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email, and I will be glad to save you some of the pain I had to go through!