How to specify a MessageBodyMember is required?

Question

I'm looking for a way to specify that some MessageBodyMember is required, so that the generated schema would have minOccurs=1 instead of minOccurs=0.
I have to manually edit the schema to add it, and it's really a pain.

I read a few articles that say this is not possible, but they are a bit old; perhaps now there's a way or a workaround.

Anybody knows if it's possible?

Answer 1

I am not aware of any way to do this - the MessageBodyMember attribute has no property or means to specify that it's a required part and thus should have minOccurs=1 in the WSDL.

See the MSDN docs on MessageBodyMember attribute.

If it's really a big problem, you could potentially create your own WSDL exporter class which would override the existing standard one provided by WCF, and that would add this minOccurs=1 attribute to all MessageBodyMember elements. There's quite a few sample on the web on how to modify and tweak the WCF WSDL exporting mechanism.