File Attachements with PHP5 SOAP

I'm writing some code to talk to a web service via WSDL-SOAP. I'm using php5's native soap implementation. So far so good.

However I now need to download files as "attachments" over soap. The interwebs is mysteriously silent on how to do this. Surely its poss开发者_StackOverflowible or the PHP docs would mention it as a limitation ? :\ I did this a few years ago with Pear soap but would really prefer to use the native Soap implementation.

Please see my answer here. Perhaps this may be helpful.

Considering this discussion on the PHP Soap Mailing List, it doesn't seem to be possible :

Guilhem Martin wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I was not able to find in the PHP SOAP documentation anything about sending
> attachment.
> So my question is: does PHP SOAP extension support SOAP attachment?
>  

No.

Samisa... 

But there isn't much detail about it...

Still, I've never seen a file being attached to a SOAP request in PHP