wcf service to service communication & data contract

Question

hi all!

i have recently been involved in developing a WCF service which acts as a kind of multicast relay (i.e. accepts some incoming data, does some processing and then sends it off to multiple other external services). this service (which i will refer to as "my service") is fed data by a second internal service.

this data is going to be relayed from my service as XML held in a string. therefore my service could simply accept a string as an parameter to a method request - but this is not ideal as we lose type safety.

the second service has a class that encapsulates all of the information which my service requires to be processed, and eventually relayed to the external services.

the second service exposes this class in it's data contract. Ideally, in order to maintain type safety, and without requiring lots of changes to the second service's implementation, i should accept this type of class as an argument to my service operation.

what would be the best way for me to say in my datacontract that i require this type of class without duplicating code? could i add a service reference to this second class, and then use the proxy class which is created in my data contract?

i just can't get my head around this, even though it seems like a trivial problem!

cheers for any help!

Answer 1

If you are trying to avoid duplication of classes, put your class declaration in its own assembly and share that dll between all parties in the WCF Service. When you create your service reference you can choose which assemblies are shared (assuming you use the VS GUI service utility).

The use of a proxy class might be a good avenue as well. If you expose your main data class as a data contract, then create a proxy of that, the proxy will have a version of the exposed class that can be used by your other services.