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tonyzero's avatar
tonyzero
New Contributor II
4 years ago
Solved

Downloading a base64 zip file using SOAP

Hi All, I am trying to use SOAP call to download a zip file. However, I cannot download and get the file I need correctly. Here is a screenshot of my pipeline. I took out the $content, which...
SOAP
  • tonyzero's avatar
    tonyzero
    4 years ago

    Hi @ptaylor ,

    I followed you suggestion and it really works. I used Base64.decodeAsBinary($content) together with application/zip → $[‘content-type’] and got the txt file in a zip.
    However, I am still not sure why I should use Base64.decodeAsBinary() to decode something what really looks like a base64 encoded string.

    Thank you very much!

ptaylor's avatar
ptaylor
Employee
4 years ago

I’m a bit confused by the SOAP Execute response. It’s reporting the Content-Transfer-Encoding as “binary”, which essentially means “not encoded”. The actual content “UEsDBBQA…” looks like it actually is base64-encoded. If so, try this:

In your Mapper, change the expression to Base64.decodeAsBinary($content). Then in the Views tab of the Mapper settings, modify the output view’s type from Document to Binary. Attach a File Writer to write the content to a .zip file.

tonyzero's avatar
tonyzero
New Contributor II
4 years ago

Hi @ptaylor ,

I followed you suggestion and it really works. I used Base64.decodeAsBinary($content) together with application/zip → $[‘content-type’] and got the txt file in a zip.
However, I am still not sure why I should use Base64.decodeAsBinary() to decode something what really looks like a base64 encoded string.

Thank you very much!

  • ptaylor's avatar
    ptaylor
    Employee
    4 years ago

    Great!

    Base64.decodeAsBinary() is the fundamental function: converting a base64-encoded String to a byte array containing the binary data (in this case, the zip compressed data).

    Baes64.decode() is actually a compound function: it starts by calling decodeAsBinary to convert the base64 String to a byte array, then converts that byte array to a String using the UTF-8 charset. In this case, the data in the byte array isn’t a UTF-8-encoded string, so that second conversion is just wrong and doesn’t result in anything meaningful. You need to first decompress the data in the byte array before converting it back to text.

    Hope that helps.

    • tonyzero's avatar
      tonyzero
      New Contributor II
      4 years ago

      Hi @ptaylor ,

      Thank you so much. That actually helps a lot!