Using a WCF Service with Complex Data Types

Question

Hi guys, I'm trying to pass a DTO with one navidation property IEnumerable<> inside of it, when I pass an object without child lists it works well, but, when I'm passing objects with childs and grandchilds the WCF services does not respond and gives me no error. I have to make something to work with this type of object specificly?

Here's my data contract

    [ServiceContract]
        public interface IProdutoService
        {
            [OperationContract]
            CategoriaResponse GetCategoria(CategoriaRequest request);

            [OperationContract]
            ProdutoResponse GetProduto(ProdutoRequest request);

            [OperationContract]
            CategoriaResponse ManageCategoria(CategoriaRequest request);

            [OperationContract]
            ProdutoResponse ManageProduto(ProdutoRequest request);
        }


//and then my DTO Class

 public class ProdutoDto
    {
        #region Primitive Properties
        [DataMember]
        public Int32 Codigo { get; set; }

        [DataMember]
        public Int32 CodigoCategoria { get; set; }

        [DataMember]
        public String Descricao { get; set; }

        [DataMember]
        public Decimal? Preco { get; set; }
        #endregion


        #region Navigation Properties
        [DataMember]
        public CategoriaDto Categoria { get; set; }

        [DataMember]
        public VendaDto[] Vendas { get; set; }
        #endregion
    }

// And my service configuration looks like this:

<services>
  <service behaviorConfiguration="behaviorAction" name="Uniarchitecture.ProdutoService.ServiceImplementations.ProdutoService">
    <endpoint binding="wsHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="bindingAction" contract="Uniarchitecture.ProdutoService.ServiceContracts.IProdutoService">
      <identity>
        <dns value="localhost"/>
      </identity>
    </endpoint>
    <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
  </service>
</services>

<behaviors>
  <serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="behaviorAction">
      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true"/>
    </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>
</behaviors>


<bindings>
  <wsHttpBinding>
    <binding name="bindingAction" transactionFlow="false" receiveTimeout="00:30:00" >
      <reliableSession enabled="true"/>
    </binding>
  </wsHttpBinding>
</bindings>

Answer 1

It is probably that your child objects are not marked as Serializable.

It also looks as if you are Missing the DataContract attribute.

From the comments below it looks like you have some objects that are not serializable. Go through all the objects that you use and mark them all with th serializable or the data contract attribute.

Answer 2

Well you must use contract aware cyclic references.