[Resolved] Conceptual help - webservice

RossC0

Hi,

I'm new to webservices and I'm looking for some conceptual help / ideas.

What I want to do is create a webservice that creates a png file and return it for display in a page.

Any ideas / advice on how best to approach this?

So far I have installed nusoap - and have some basic webservices up and running. But they only handle text.

Many thanks for any ideas or concepts 🙂

rehfeld

you can use the gd library to dynamically create images

www.php.net/gd

RossC0

Thanks - got GD installed - creating the image is all sorted - its more of how I handle it over the webservice.

As my webservice Server is only accessable internally, I cant save the image file and return the location as a string.

I need to return the binary (base64 encoded?) to the caller.

Then Im a bit confused as to how best to handle it.

Do I have to write the png image to a file and then display it or is there another way round ?

Weedpacket

Originally posted by RossC0
I cant save the image file and return the location as a string.

If you don't supply a filename parameter to imagepng(), it will be sent to the client instead. Just remember that (a) it is preceded by a 'Content-Type:image/png' header, and (b) the image is the only thing being sent; the script can't be sending any other output. So for example if you want to embed this image in an HTML page, you'd use the <img> tag, and the src= attribute would refer to the script that generates the image (probably with parameters in the querystring to specify what is to go in the image).

All that notwithstanding:

I need to return the binary (base64 encoded?) to the caller.

Putting the binary data of an image directly into an HTML page can be done, but the only browsers I know of where it works are Firefox and (I presume) others running the Gecko rendering engine.

RossC0

Thanks for your input,

I'm well on my way - I've used the imagepng() and captured the output, to get the binary.

Then handle the binary once returned as needed.