The Server shall provide either a single DICOM PS3.10 object for the SOP Instance or one or more bulk data items. In order to parse the bulk data items it is necessary to also retrieve the corresponding metadata for the specified Study, Series, or Instance.

The Server shall return the document(s), or an error code when the document(s) cannot be returned. If the server cannot convert all of the bulk data to any of the requested media types, then an error code shall be returned, either a "Not Acceptable" response if no data is returned or a "Partial Content" response if only some data is returned.

The client can compare the bulk data URLs in the metadata and the message response to determine which bulk data elements have been returned.

All response formats have a content type of multipart/related with a message boundary separator. The response format depends on the Accept header specified in the request.