jsonrpc

I am trying to upload a file as cck attachment to a new node using JSON_RPC service. The file gets uploaded to the Drupal file system but it's blank, 0 byte file. I think problem lies somewhere in encoding and may be it's a TI api issue. I submitted a question"How to convert a Titanium Blob to string?" on their forum but also want to check with the Drupal community and see if anybody else faced the same issue. Here is the code

I saw this mentioned a few times in various posts, but could not find a solution.

If I utilise a view in "node" format, then I do indeed get the imagefield file information required to load the image. HOWEVER, I also get a number of large "blob" style text field contents as the entire node is returned, this requires much more bandwidth (3x more) for each item, at least. Thus making the call slow and wasting time and bandwidth. I also cannot determine how to get fivestar rating values to be returned for each node in the "node" format option.