WCF Web Service Bloat

Question

I am developing a WCF web service which has become quite bloated. What techniques do you use to split up the implementation of the contract?

Answer 1

Well you have a couple choices:

First, you could leave it all in one class, but split up into different files using the partial class feature of C#.

Second, you could have the main service class just pass requests off to one of a number of other actual classes that are organized logically.

A third alternative is to consider refactoring to reduce the number of operations you have. Is there actually a use to all of the methods you're exposing?

Finally, you could always split up the service into multiple WCF services.

Answer 2

It's hard to answer your question if you don't give any more information. Do you mean that your service interface is bloated, or the class implementation? It's hard to answer well, if I don't see the code, or have no other information, anyway, I'll try:

Notice that WCF service is basically just a regular class that implements an interface and has some attributes on its methods. So all the other good OO design rules apply to it. Think about what it does, does it have really single responsibility, if not try to outsource some of that responsibility to other classes that your service depends on. If you need a non-default constructor, use IInstanceProvider to create the service class, and supply it with its dependencies (or if you use Windsor Container use WCF Facility).

If you really want to you can streach your inheritance chain, and move some of the code to a base class. I don't do it, however and always prefer to use composition over inheritance.

Inspect your service contract, and think about how cohesive it really is. Maybe what you should do is to split it, into few smaller, more cohesive services.