I have classes that are needed in both my web service and my server.
For example, I have a class named Order that I'd like to send from my server to the web service and vice-versa.
Problem is that the class in the server is Order and the one on the web service is localhost.Order, and it is impossible to convert between them, even though they are built from the very same code. Error is cannot convert from 'Order[]' to 'localhost.Order[]'.
What can I do? Thank you very much.
when you add reference to web service you can specify which classes to reuse. by default it generates classes based on WDSL that web service produce.
The namespace used is determined by the name you give the reference when you add it.
For more information see this answer to a similar question:
Unable to cast object of type MyObject to type MyObject
You should maybe have a look at WCF services:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332338.aspx
I've used these on a few projects where both have references to a shared library, and one web site will request one of these objects via a WCF service call from another site. It's very clean, and it opens up other options for transport/security which can be very useful.
The question appears to suggest that you are using ASMX Web Services. If so, you have your work cut out for you.
Jelle Druyts wrote an extension for ASMX that can do, more or less, what you're asking. You have to configure your shared types at the machine level (machine.config). It's not pretty.
There's also a fix for that extension to make it work with nullable types.
Good luck getting this to work with Visual Studio 2008 or on Vista/Windows 7. You'll be OK if you're still running XP with VS 2005.
If you can, you really should consider using WCF for the client proxy instead, since WCF makes it very easy to share types. In fact, the Visual Studio 2008 integration does this by default; you just need to make sure your client project references the assembly containing the service types.
Related
I am a Java developer who has created a rather big Web service that works nice with Java clients or other tools (Soap UI).
One of our clients wants to write a .NET client for the web service and uses the "add service reference" feature of VS2010. According to the client this does not work since our WSDL and XSD files use "Forbidden XML constructs" as defined in this article:
The problem is that we have made heavy usage of xsd:attribute data in WSDL.
So the question is:
Is there a workaround to make .NET stub generation code compliant with WSDL/XSD files that contain xsd:attribute? Is there another .NET library for webservices that supports this feature?
Another question of mine would be why does Microsoft impose these limitations in the first place? Why xsd:attribute is a forbidden costruct in a web service??? Any clues on that?
Probably related: C#.NET Generating web service reference using WSDL (from XML schema) problem
If you have access to a machine with the .NET Framework on it why don't you use svcutil to generate a proxy/config settings for him and send it to him?
See www.svcutil.com for the list of switches and options that are available to you
I have found that if the customer cannot do it one way and you provide a documented (possibly automated) way of doing things then that will generally suffice.
I have tested the HelloWorld.wsdl supplied in the link with the .NET version of Remobjects (http://www.remobjects.com) and it seemed to work fine. I don't have an actual service to test this with but I would suggest that you (or the client :) ) download it and give it a try.
The .NET version can be found here:
http://www.remobjects.com/ro/net.aspx
Apparently the answer is that you should NOT use the modern way of generating stubs with svcutil.exe and instead use the legacy way with wsdl.exe
Creating stubs from the command line with wsdl.exe works fine. The resulting code works as expected and the .NET client connects to the Axis2 Web service.
I want to access a remote SQL database for my Silverlight client. I know that there are various ways to do this (Entity Framework model, Linq to SQL), but all of those rely on something in the web project (or, at least, all of the tutorials I've read do). What's unusual for me is that there is no web project, which of course prevents me from using various assemblies.
The only thing I do have which might be useful is a WCF service running on IIS, which will have less limitations (and I can add that as a service reference in my SL project). But I'm not even sure if this is a feasible option for this problem.
Any solutions or suggestions would be great.
Thanks.
Edit: Thanks for the suggestions guys, but here's a little more: I am making an individual XAP that is loaded into something else (someone else's project is importing and loading the XAP files), so I don't have access to the web component. The loader itself will be hosted within a website (at least, I assume it will be).
I already have a WCF service set up which is currently hosted in IIS, so I can potentially create something here. How? Well, it seems I can generate the ORM classes using SQLMetal.exe, and then import that code into the WCF service. This will allow the service to make calls to the remote database and have that data returned in C# classes. The perhaps I'll make those data classes as ServiceContracts and pass the data that way. What's the problem here? Well, to be honest, I'm not really sure how it would work. I mean, I call the WCF Service from the SL application, which does its thing. It then must contact the SL application (I have no idea how to do that part) and send along a load of data. It would be great if someone had has experience of this and would offer some suggestions. I know it's not really how you're supposed to do it, but I've drawn the short straw so I'm stuck with it.
Ok, so if I understand it correctly, you use a Silverlight application (XAP) which is started locally from a network share or something? Because why would you not have a web project when using Silverlight? (is there no server available to host it?)
But ok, when that is the case, you can access a WCF service from Silverlight. However it has some limititations. For instance you can only use asynchronous calls to the service, and you can only use WCF basichttpbinding as binding for the WCF service.
See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197959%28v=vs.95%29.aspx
First, I would recommend you use WPF instead of Silverlight for this project. If you're not using this as a web client, then WPF is a million times easier / better.
But if that's not a possibility:
You can write a self-hosted WCF service and run it somewhere accessible. Self-hosted will allow for WCF connections to connect without the IIS necessary. In your self-hosted program you need:
Front end WCF defined
Back end SQL database
Depending on how smart this client needs to be, a BusinessLogic layer to transform the data from WCF to SQL.
Silverlight is sandboxed, so it can only access its own Web application. Therefore, your best bet is to include a WCF or ASMX web service in your web application that handles the DB access.
If you don't want to run a sandboxed UI on a Web application, you cannot use Silverlight but should use WebForms or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) instead.
Can I write a web service that implements the same methods and returns the same custom objects using both C#/WCF and also Java Web Services? And if so, can I then access the web services using a single web reference but with different addresses?
I'm asking because I have to host a web service that has a GetCitations and GetTerms method for publically exposing our database content. We are on IIS, so I was going to do it with WCF. However, other partners in the project also have to host an equivalent service and they are all Java based.
We are then building a software app that needs to connect to any number of these services (as defined at runtime by a user). I am expecting that we can have one set of classes to connect to these services (but with different endpoitn addresses), but am not sure whether I'm right in expecting this to work.
Is this possible?
And what considerations/restrictions are there?
Thanks.
It shouldn't be a problem, if you make sure that both services have equivalent wsdl files and you use http/soap binding.
I am not sure about using the binary (net.tcp) one with WCF, though. It might be a problem.
One way to do it is to use JAX-WS (Java 6) to expose a method as a web service.
The JAX-WS stack allows for automatically generating the correct WSDL at runtime.
The .NET team can then take that WSDL, and use standard tools to create a mock implementation of that WSDL. This mock implementation is then used as the actual .NET implementation, and you then use standard tools to generate the WSDL for that web service.
You now have to web services with the same semantics each with their own WSDL.
Both Java and .NET can implement a SOAP compliant web service, so the answer is yes, you can write a .NET and a Java webservice that implement the same WSDL.
What do I need to call a web service over https in C#?
Do I need to get the certificate form the site? How do I use this to call the web service?
There's nothing special or different for calling a web service over https than over http. You generate a client proxy from the WSDL using either svcutil.exe (or Add Service Reference in VS) or wsdl.exe and invoke the method. The lower level classes HttpWebRequest and HttpWebResponse will eventually take care of the actual call and certificates but it should be transparent for your code. Of course the server hosting the web service needs to provide a valid certificate.
I take that you are using Visual Studio to create your projects, if you are it is pretty easy to do. I take that you have the url for the web service that you would like to connect to and it starts with HTTPS.
In your project in the solution explorer (assuming you using Visual Studio), you should see a node saying "References" and another one saying "Web References". Right click on the "Web Reference" and then basically follow the wizard. It is pretty straight forward. You can spec your own Namespace. I usually use the format SomethingAPI. Then use the API as you would like any other object in your project. You will get the intellisense and all.
There might occur known problems with some certificates though. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823177/en-us
Do you have a client certificate that has been supplied by the provider of the web service?
If so, there are various different ways of doing this depending upon which version of .NET you are using. What version are you using, and are you limited in how you can generate your client proxy classes?
I have the following class in Class Library: Artist, which is a POCO
Now I have a method in a web-service (which has a reference to the mentioned-above library) with a signature like this:
[WebMethod]
public int Artist_AddArtist(Artist a) {
//
}
When I try to consume this service from an application (that also has a reference to the mentioned-above Class library), the expected parameter of the Artist_AddArtist method is not Artist, but a new type of Artist that is being generated in Reference.cs which is a partial class that is auto-generated.
Thus since in my application I use, supposedly the same Artist class from the library and now the Web Service method expects this new auto generated type, I cannot pass an instance of it to the web-service.
How can I fix this issue?
Maybe switching to WCF services is an option for you. As far as I remember, with a WCF service, you can reuse the same types on ther server and client side.
This article explains how to migrate an ASMX web service to a WCF service.
You cannot, and should not, fix the problem.
Some others will tell you to do things like edit the generated file, but that's not a good practice (as the changes will go away as soon as the Web Reference is updated).
What you're seeing is by design. See Basics: How Web Services Work.
Briefly, when you use "Add Web Reference", Visual Studio downloads the WSDL file from the service, and uses the XML Schemas from the WSDL to create some proxy classes to represent the XML described by the schema. It also creates a proxy class for the service itself, having methods for each operation in the service.
The proxy data classes can serialize to the XML that the service is expecting to receive, and can be deserialized back from the XML that the server sends in reply.
One way to think of it is that you only have this problem because both client and service are .NET. If your client were written in Java, then you wouldn't be thinking of sharing classes.
Note that WCF can do this, if necessary. It introduces a dependency between the client and service (they both have to use compatible versions of the assembly containing the classes), but when you need to do it, the option is there. It's useful when there is behavior in these classes that must be used both by the client and by the service.