Hi dims:
May be i am missing something...the difference in my mind is a person implementing a databinding layer should be able to access the attachements without having to build the om tree. straight from stax to java objects with no om and use whatever they need to store the attachments byte arrays or data handlers or some databinding specific construct.
+1. OM was built to allow you to optimize out the tree-building/buffering for the normal XML case - you call getXMLStreamReaderWithoutCaching() and go. MTOM/attachments are sort of the fly in the ointment there, in that you need another layer below StAX in order to get at the attachments. We've got that layer now, but it's hidden and tightly coupled to the OM tree framework. The suggestion is simply to open it up so you can do exactly what dims describes here.
--Glen
