Shared data object between WCF service and Silverlight app

Question

I have a custom data entity (data object) that is exposed via a WCF webservice. The WCF service lives in a web application. I then have a Silverlight application with a service reference to that WCF service. When i add the service reference a proxy is generated, and that includes a version of the custom data entity.

How should i structure my code so that the data entity is declared in one place, and shared amongst the project containing the WCF service and any Silverlight applications that reference it? I want to eliminate the version of the data entity that is generated with the proxy.

Thanks :)

Answer 1

I´m not quite shure why anybody want to do that. You have to understand that the type you find in the proxy is a projection of the Type you have at Service server site. It´s defined in the *.g.cs files and gets generated new if you update the service reference. In my opinion it´s the best way to have it declared in a single location, and project it. You need it in two places and it´s single defined.

I may be wrong anyway .....

Answer 2

Declare the data entities in the WCF service or a project that the service refereneces, then from the Silverlight project add the entities as links and make sure the "Reuse types in referenced assemblies" checkbox is selected from the Service Reference Settings dialog.

You can put the types in either the Silverlight or WCF side.

I have tried doing things this way and found that using DTOs instead and mapping them to the entities in the Silverlight side to be much cleaner and easier to work with although I did write a bunch of mapping code to get the DTOs into the entities and vice versa.

Answer 3

There is a good example of how to do this here by Pete Brown. Using that approach you can use the same classes in both the Silverlight client and in the WCF service without having to use the generated objects.