WCF Service Max number of Methods

Question

Maximum of how many number of Methods, in a WCF Service be implemented.

Answer 1

There is no maximum. You can have as many as you wish, AFAIK.

However, whether or not it is practical is a different issue. It will become quite unwieldy if you have too many methods on a single contract.

Answer 2

Although there is no maximum, you may run into issues with Metadata Exchange - and the following config value and it's default: maxNameTableCharCount.

Whilst attempting to add a new function to an existing functioning WCF Service, I encountered errors whilst trying to "Update Service Reference" - relating to default value of maxNameTableCharCount being too small to handle the size of the mex transfer. It is possible to override the default values for Metadata Exchange with custom mex bindings, by placing additional config within the server config.

Details of the specific exception and the solution that got around the issue can be found:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/38d09aca-acd3-4eb8-a5d3-803a68de92d9/

Server Mex endpoints should be specified as follows:

<endpoint address="mex" binding="customBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" name="" bindingConfiguration="customMex" listenUriMode="Explicit" />

With a Custom Binding block specified as follows:

<customBinding>
 <binding name="customMex">
 <textMessageEncoding>
 <readerQuotas maxDepth="2147483647" maxStringContentLength="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647" maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" maxNameTableCharCount="2147483647" />
 </textMessageEncoding>
 <httpTransport transferMode="Buffered" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" maxBufferSize="2147483647"/>
 </binding>

It may help if you're running into issues with lots of methods on a service.

Answer 3

The practical limit is probably no more than 10-12 methods. Any more than that and you're probably no longer describing the operations of a single component. I'd try really hard to refactor any component with dozens of operations down into multiple components.

That said, I'm sure there are exceptions!