In our project we are consuming WCF webservices exposed at Central location as services with basicHttpBinding.
In client desktop application we need consume those webservices. I am able to generate proxy class using WSDL.exe.
But, I need to convert data/class given by the webservice into my local class, for that now I am xmlserialzing those class/objects given by webservice and deserializing into my local classes as both classes schema matches exactly same.
Is there any better way that I can follow?
or
Do I need to assign each property from one class to another?
thanks
nRk.
declare class manually instead of generating. This is the most DRY solution.
try Automapper
If you have control on your local classes (they are not generated code; or you are generating them, yourself) you can use xml attributes to decorate your class, so you can serialize and deserialize it to that xml you work with and you do not have to have specific names for your properties. In addition to this, you may have additional properties on your local class.
If you have not control on defining your local classes, then you have to define a converter or as elder_george mentioned, use AutoMapper.
Using a manual written converter IMO is the fastest way and you can define them as implicit converter operators on your local class.
I've done the serialize/deserialize thing myself just as you had. If your classes have the same properties as the proxy classes you could write a helper method that uses reflection to iterate through the properties of the proxy and set the corresponding properties of your class. As long as the property names are the same, that one method should work on all classes.
A few thoughts:
use assembly sharing via WCF; this allows you to use the same actual assembly at both ends. As long as this is a DTO assembly, this is fine (not hugely portable, though). This is /reference (also /r) in svcutil.exe, or you can do it via the IDE
use DataContractSerializer and round-trip (like you are already; just that WCF maps most closely to DataContractSerializer, not XmlSerializer)
Related
I am attempting to generate c# classes of FHIR Resources, How handle Multiple classes with same name? For Example -> In Organization and Patient resources there are Composed classes with same name "Contact" and Contact is one Complex date Type too. etc... Please Help
http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/organization.html
http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/fhir/datatypes.html#Contact
Regards
I don't think the XSD.exe tool is capable of doing this, your best bet maybe to manually nest those classes where this is a problem, and then using the serialization attributes (most notable XmlTypeAttribute) to change the name of the types in the XSD if at all necessary.
Please note that a completely generated set of classes is part of the .NET reference implementation for FHIR (http://www.github.com/ewoutkramer/fhir-net-api). We'll soon have the class generator for this available as part of this project, including a set of support functions to serialize them correctly to FHIR XML and FHIR Json.
The full class name of organization contact is actually Organization.contact.
I need to generate or define new class based on deserialization serialized class. So I want to transfer class definition from server to client to have access to it's properties later.
Is it possible and how?
Proper way to do it would be to either expose a schema definition for your service for clients to consume & generate strongly type class definitions from that or provide a DLL with your DTO contract definitions (class/interface definitions) to the client.
If you chose neither of those approaches (no schema & no dll with interfaces) but still
want to generate a class definition, you can in an improper way generate .cs class definitions, from a sample data of the service (call the services couple of times and intercept the responses or use some http client). However this approach does not guarantee that you will get an accurate or/and complete generation. Basically you can go from:
XML->XSD->C# cs class file (or even XML to C# cs file directly)or JSON->C# class file
And deserializing object to dynamic especially when you don't own both the server & client code is pretty much the worst thing you can do. And this way you didn't transfer you class definition to the client. Deserializng to dynamic objects is actually no desrialization at all as matter of fact, it gives you a dictionary of strings with syntactical sugar to access them as properties at runtime with not compile time support which can be equal to a disaster. In short don't do it unless you own all the code (not that it's a good idea then either but maybe you could get by somehow)
One portable way to transfer the property definitions and the data itself is to use the JSON serializer.
You can deserialize into a dynamic object using JSON.Net
Deserialize json object into dynamic object using Json.net
I have some WCF services which employes default DataContractSerialization. Some of the service methods return Dictionary objects. One of the clients are generating XSD files from WCF services (biztalk related) and he is requesting to convert all dictionary types to a new dictionary type which implements IXmlSerializable.
I wonder, if there will be any unexpected results of this conversion which may affect the DataContract serialization somehow?
Update:
Server and client share the same domain dlls, clients do not generate them from service. Maybe in the question I was missing the main point; I wonder if an object is to be serizalized through datacontract serialization, implementing IXmlSerializable in the object will cause any problems.
Is your client sharing dlls with the service?
Unless he is sharing libraries (dlls) with service then making changes at the service end won't make any difference. Your WCF is returning data, not classes. That data is being reconstituted into classes which are created by the client based on the definitions in the WSDL your service returns. You can't control those generated libraries (by making chnages on the server) unless you share dlls between the client and the server.
If he wants to wrap the generated dictionaries in an IXmlSerializable dictionary then he can, or if he wants to generate a different type of dictionary then he can probably do that as well, but I don't think there is anything you can do server side.
Tell your client to use the following serializable dictionary when they need to serialize a dictionary result from a service call: C# Serializable Dictionary – a Working Example
It accepts an ordinary dictionary as constructor argument thus converts any dictionary into a serializable one. You can also return SerializableDictionary type as the service call result if you like.
There is an unexpected problem; since domain objects are already implementing data contract serialization, there is no way to implement IXmlSerializable without modifying the whole serialization mechanism.
I have a class with a read-only property defined. In my code I define this as a property with a getter only.
I want to be able to send this object back and forth across a web service. When I call a "Get" method in the service, it would be populated with a value on the service side. Once I define this property, I don't want the consumer of the web service to be able to set/change this property.
When I add a reference to this web service to a project, the object has the property serialized a few different ways depending on how I try to define the object on the service side:
internal setter: Creates the property in the WSDL. Visual Studio generates a class with both a getter & a setter for this property.
no setter: Does not create the property in the WSDL. Visual Studio then obviously does not define this property at all.
Read-only public member variable - Does not create the property in the WSDL. Again, Visual Studio will not do anything with this property since it doesn't know about it.
Allowing the consumer of the web service to set a value for this property will not cause any harm. If the value is set, it is ignored on the web service side. I'd just prefer if the consumer can't change/set the property to begin.
Is there any way to define a property as read-only? Right now we're using C#/.NET 2.0 for the web service, and (for now at least) we have control over all of the consumers of this service, so I can try changing configurations if needed, but I prefer to only change things on the web service and not the consumers.
I can be wrong, but I think the problem here is how serialization works - in order to deserialize an object the serializer creates an empty object and then sets all the properties on this object - thats why you need a setter for the properties to be included in serialization. The client code has the same "interface" to the object as the deserializer.
Caveat, I am a Java guy so the first part of my answer focuses on what may be possible in C#.
Firstly, with a custom serializer in Java, you can do almost anything you want, including directly setting values of a protected or private field using reflection so long as the security manager doesn't prevent this activity. I don't know if there are analogous components in C# for the security manager, field access, and custom serializers, but I would suspect that there are.
Secondly, I think there is a fundamental difference in how you are viewing Web services and the Web service interface as part of your application. You are right-click generating the Web service interface from existing code - known as "code first". There are many articles out there about why WSDL first is the preferred approach. This one summarizes things fairly well, but I would recommend reading others as well. While you are thinking in terms of a shared code library between the client side and server side of your Web service and maintaining object structure and accessibility, there is no such guarantee once you publish an API as a Web service and don't have control over all of the consumers. The WSDL and XSD serve as a generic description of your Web service API and your server and client can be implemented using different data binding configurations, object classes, or languages. You should think of your Web service interface and the XML that you pass in and out of it as describing the semantics of the exchange, but not necessarily the syntax of the data (your class structure) once it is internalized (deserialized) in your client or server.
Furthermore, it is advisable to decouple your transport related structures from your internal business logic structures lest you find yourself having to refactor both your server implementation, your Web service API, and your (and other's) client implementations all at the same time.
There's no built-in way to do this in .NET 2.0 as far as I know. In cases where I wanted to serialize a read-only property, I've implemented the IXmlSerializable interface so that I could control the ReadXml() and WriteXml() methods.
In later versions of the .NET framework, you can serialize read-only properties by setting an attribute on the backing field.
I'm still new to the ASP.NET world, so I could be way off base here, but so far this is to the best of my (limited) knowledge!
Let's say I have a standard business object "Contact" in the Business namespace. I write a Web Service to retrieve a Contact's info from a database and return it. I then write a client application to request said details.
Now, I also then create a utility method that takes a "Contact" and does some magic with it, like Utils.BuyContactNewHat() say. Which of course takes the Contact of type Business.Contact.
I then go back to my client application and want to utilise the BuyContactNewHat method, so I add a reference to my Utils namespace and there it is. However, a problem arises with:
Contact c = MyWebService.GetContact("Rob);
Utils.BuyContactNewHat(c); // << Error Here
Since the return type of GetContact is of MyWebService.Contact and not Business.Contact as expected. I understand why this is because when accessing a web service, you are actually programming against the proxy class generated by the WSDL.
So, is there an "easier" way to deal with this type of mismatch? I was considering perhaps trying to create a generic converter class that uses reflection to ensure two objects have the same structure than simply transferring the values across from one to the other.
You are on the right track. To get the data from the proxy object back into one of your own objects, you have to do left-hand-right-hand code. i.e. copy property values. I'll bet you that there is already a generic method out there that uses reflection.
Some people will use something other than a web service (.net remoting) if they just want to get a business object across the wire. Or they'll use binary serialization. I'm guessing you are using the web service for a reason, so you'll have to do property copying.
You don't actually have to use the generated class that the WSDL gives you. If you take a look at the code that it generates, it's just making calls into some .NET framework classes to submit SOAP requests. In the past I have copied that code into a normal .cs file and edited it. Although I haven't tried this specifically, I see no reason why you couldn't drop the proxy class definition and use the original class to receive the results of the SOAP call. It must already be doing reflection under the hood, it seems a shame to do it twice.
I would recommend that you look at writing a Schema Importer Extension, which you can use to control proxy code generation. This approach can be used to (gracefully) resolve your problem without kludges (such as copying around objects from one namespace to another, or modifying the proxy generated reference.cs class only to have it replaced the next time you update the web reference).
Here's a (very) good tutorial on the subject:
http://www.microsoft.com/belux/msdn/nl/community/columns/jdruyts/wsproxy.mspx