REST / SOAP endpoints for a WCF service

Question

Hi, I have a WCF service and I want to expose it as both a RESTfull service and as a SOAP service. Anyone has done something like this before?

Answer 1

You can expose the service in two different endpoints. the SOAP one can use the binding that support SOAP e.g. basicHttpBinding, the RESTful one can use the webHttpBinding. I assume your REST service will be in JSON, in that case, you need to configure the those two endpoints with the following behaviour configuration

<endpointBehaviors>
  <behavior name="jsonBehavior">
    <enableWebScript/>
  </behavior>
</endpointBehaviors>

An example of endpoint configuration in your scenario is

<services>
  <service name="TestService">
    <endpoint address="soap" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="ITestService"/>
    <endpoint address="json" binding="webHttpBinding"  behaviorConfiguration="jsonBehavior" contract="ITestService"/>
  </service>
</services>

so, the service will be available at

• http://www.example.com/soap
• http://www.example.com/json

Apply [WebGet] to the operation contract to make it RESTful. e.g.

public interface ITestService
{
   [OperationContract]
   [WebGet]
   string HelloWorld(string text)
}

Note, if the REST service is not in JSON, parameters of the operations can not contain complex type.

Reply to the post for SOAP and RESTful POX(XML)

For plain old XML as return format, this is an example that would work both for SOAP and XML.

[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://test")]
public interface ITestService
{
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "accounts/{id}")]
    Account[] GetAccount(string id);
}

POX behavior for REST Plain Old XML

<behavior name="poxBehavior">
  <webHttp/>
</behavior>

Endpoints

<services>
  <service name="TestService">
    <endpoint address="soap" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="ITestService"/>
    <endpoint address="xml" binding="webHttpBinding"  behaviorConfiguration="poxBehavior" contract="ITestService"/>
  </service>
</services>

Service will be available at

• http://www.example.com/soap
• http://www.example.com/xml

REST request try it in browser,

http://www.example.com/xml/accounts/A123

SOAP request client endpoint configuration for SOAP service after adding the service reference,

  <client>
    <endpoint address="http://www.example.com/soap" binding="basicHttpBinding"
      contract="ITestService" name="BasicHttpBinding_ITestService" />
  </client>

in C#

TestServiceClient client = new TestServiceClient();
client.GetAccount("A123");

Another way of doing it is to expose two different service contract and each one with specific configuration. This may generate some duplicates at code level, however at the end of the day, you want to make it working.

Answer 2

My REST service is using XML. Anyway, the thing is that I'm using UriTemplate to map different urls to different methods in the service. So for example, I have www.example.com/service.svc/accounts mapped to the GetAccounts method. The problem I'm having is that when I add another endpoint and configure it using basicHttpBinding, the url that's used to access the soap endpoint interferes with the REST endpoint urls. So when I try to access the SOAP endpoint using www.example.com/service.svc/soap, I get Service Endpoint not found error.

Answer 3

Hi! This post has already a very good answer by "Community wiki" and I also recommend to look at Rick Strahl's Web Blog, there are many good posts about WCF Rest like this.

I used both to get this kind of MyService-service... Then I can use the REST-interface from jQuery or SOAP from Java.

This is from my Web.Config:

<system.serviceModel>
 <services>
  <service name="MyService" behaviorConfiguration="MyServiceBehavior">
   <endpoint name="rest" address="" binding="webHttpBinding" contract="MyService" behaviorConfiguration="restBehavior"/>
   <endpoint name="mex" address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="MyService"/>
   <endpoint name="soap" address="soap" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="MyService"/>
  </service>
 </services>
 <behaviors>
  <serviceBehaviors>
   <behavior name="MyServiceBehavior">
    <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
    <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" />
   </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>
  <endpointBehaviors>
   <behavior name="restBehavior">
    <webHttp/>
   </behavior>
  </endpointBehaviors>
 </behaviors>
</system.serviceModel>

And this is my service-class (.svc-codebehind, no interfaces required):

    /// <summary> MyService documentation here ;) </summary>
[ServiceContract(Name = "MyService", Namespace = "http://myservice/", SessionMode = SessionMode.NotAllowed)]
//[ServiceKnownType(typeof (IList<MyDataContractTypes>))]
[ServiceBehavior(Name = "MyService", Namespace = "http://myservice/")]
public class MyService
{
    [OperationContract(Name = "MyResource1")]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml, UriTemplate = "MyXmlResource/{key}")]
    public string MyResource1(string key)
    {
        return "Test: " + key;
    }

    [OperationContract(Name = "MyResource2")]
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "MyJsonResource/{key}")]
    public string MyResource2(string key)
    {
        return "Test: " + key;
    }
}

Actually I use only Json or Xml but those both are here for a demo purpose. Those are GET-requests to get data. To insert data I would use method with attributes:

[OperationContract(Name = "MyResourceSave")]
[WebInvoke(Method = "POST", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, UriTemplate = "MyJsonResource")]
public string MyResourceSave(string thing){
    //...

Answer 4

If you only want to develop a single web service and have it hosted on many different endpoints (i.e. SOAP, XML+REST, JSON+REST, JSV+REST, etc). You should definitely check out my open source web service framework http://www.servicestack.net as it was built for exactly this purpose allowing you to easily write a single webservice and have it automatically available on a number of different endpoints without any configuration or code-gen required.

By default the XML, JSON and JSV endpoints allow you to query your webservices through REST-like urls. You can check out the live example for more info.