check the availability of the WCF Web Service

Question

Hi I want to check the availability of the WCF web service i.c service is up or down thorugh the C# code.How to achieve that.

Thanks is Advance Sekar

Answer 1

When you call Client.Open if it is down that should throw an exception which you can trap.
What I prefer to do is implement a method which returns a boolean called Ping. The code basically just does return true; so it returns as quickly as possible. On the client side I call it and trap exceptions, if I get any then I know the web service is down.
You can extend the pattern to do things like PingCheckDB or PingCheckX which can do a fake/sample test run so you enable/disable functionality on the client based on what is available.

Answer 2

To elaborate on the previous answer: the only way to determine if a service is "available" is to first determine what you mean by "available". For instance, a service that depends on an external resource like a database may be perfectly available, but if the database cannot be accessed, then the service will be available but useless.

You should also ask what you are going to do with the information about availability. In particular, what would happen if you decided that the service was "available" yet, when you call it, you find that it is not really "available". An example would be if the above service was available and the database was available, but there was one particular stored procedure which would always fail. Is the service "available" in this case? How bad would it be if you indicated that it was available, but this one stored procedure failed?

In many cases, it's best to simply go ahead and make the calls to the web service, then handle any exceptions. If you've validated the parameters you're sending to the service, then, from the point of view of the end user, any failure of the service amounts to the service being unavailable.

It is not available to be successfully used, you see.