WCF proxy client generated with wsdl not matching for ServiceContract, XmlSerializerFormat attributes.

Question

Hi,

I am developing WCF services in .net 3.5 framework and hosting them in IIS 5.1 windows xp sp3 with basicHttpBiding.

Services consuming client developed in .net 2.0 framework. For this I generated proxy client using WSDL.EXE. This tool generates proxy class without any problem, but the problem it adds for every property adds extra property "[property]Specified", but that work fine without any problem, only need to specify "specified = true" when assigning value to any property

To remove this extra property I added XmlSerializerFormat attribe along with ServiceContract attribute. WSDL.EXE generates the class without extra property, but it excludes some class which are included previously.

Is there any properties that I need to set to generate the excluded classes?

Note: All contract classes are attributed with DataContract and properties with DataMemeber.

Thanks
nRk

Answer 1

The standard WCF DataContractSerializer will serialize everything marked with [DataMember] - regardless of the .NET visibility (public/protected/private/internal).

When you switch to the XmlSerializerFormat, the behavior changes - now the XmlSerializer will serialize everything that has a public visibility, and does not have a [XmlIgnore] marked on it.

I would assume some of your classes and members are not marked with public and thus don't get serialized anymore. Also the XmlSerializer requires classes to have an explicit, parameter-less constructor which will be used in deserialization - do all your classes have that? And of course, that constructor also needs to be public.

Answer 2

XmlSerializer uses XmlIncludeAttribute instead of KnownTypeAttribute to discover child types that are not included in operation contracts. So you might try adding them to the base class:

[XmlInclude(typeof(ChildClass1))]
[XmlInclude(typeof(ChildClass2))]
public class BaseClass {}