I often use WCF Test Client. Unfortunately this tool does not order alphabetically nor in "order of appearance" (order in which operations are declared in service contract class). This make it quite difficult to find specific operation if there are many.
Is there any way to force WCF Test Client, to order the operations alphabetically?
Where the default ordering comes from?
Even though it does not seem to be possible to order operations alphabetically I realized that WCF Test Client has built-in incremental search.
That helps if you know what you are looking for.
Related
Hi i would like your help so i can decide on what to do with this matter. The thing is that at my work we are currently migrating from Web Services to using WCF, now the thing is that when we used web services we had one web service that was in charge of invoking the business logic now the thing is that i would like to know what is actually the best way to achieve the same functionallity with WCF, using one unique service to call the different business logic classes or have multiple services to call the different business logic classes? also i have to clarify that when i say one unique service i mean that this will have just one method that one way or another will be capable of invoking any of the business logic classes depending on certain parameters and will also have other methods but for other different tasks, now i would like to know which would be the best approach for this, by the way the reason we have consider using one service like i told you is to manage from there the commits or rollbacks necessaries when something blows when making an operation on the db and have it just from one place, not all over the place, thanks in advance and well i'm kind of new with wcf.
You can migrate your existing service structure into WCF and still have the same functionality. You'll need to create and expose the service(s) according to WCF, but the architectural structure can remain how you have it in Web Services. You may want to revisit your design. There are many features at your disposal, including Entity Framework, that allow you to manage commits, rollbacks, etc.
I’m having a little bit of difficulty understanding some architectural principles when developing a service. If you make a call to a WCF service and it returns a collection of items(Orders) (which are custom made classes made up From LINQ-to-SQL entity data) to a client and each item has a collection of items(OrderItems) (one-to-many) that are also made up from the same LINQ-to-SQL context. If I make another call to the service and request a particular OrderItem and modify its details on the client side, how then does the first collection of Items realise that one of its Orders OrderItem has changed from the client side. I am taking the approach of when changing the OrderItem I send the OrderItem object to the WCF service for storage via LINQ-to-SQL commands but to update the collection that the client first called I use IList interface to search and replace each instance of the OrderItem. Also subscribing each item to the PropertyChanged event give some control. This does work with certain obvious limitations but how would one 'more correctly' approach this by perhaps managing all of the data changing from the service itself.. ORM? static classes? If this is too difficult question to answer, perhaps some link or even chat group that I can discuss this as I understand that this site is geared for quick Q/A type topics rather than guided tutorial discussions.
Thanks all the same.
Chris Leach
If you have multiple clients changing the same data at the same time, at the end of the day you system must implement some sort of Concurrency Control. Broadly thats going to fall into one of two categories: pessimistic or optimistic.
In your case it sounds like you are venturing down the optimistic route, whereby anyone can access the resource via the service - it does not get locked or accessed exclusively. What that means is ultimately you need to detect and resolve conflicts that will arise when one client changes the data before another.
The second architectural requirement you seem to be describing is some way to synchronize changes between clients. This is a very difficult problem. One way is to build some sort of publish/subscribe system whereby, after a client retrieves some resources from the service, it also subscribes to get updates to changes to resource. You can do this either in a push or pull based fashion (pull is probably simpler, i.e. just poll for changes).
Fundamentally you are trying to solve a reasonably complex problem, but its also one which pops up quite frequently in software.
I have a WCF Data Service with a custom operation named MostRecentFilms that returns the 10 most recent films in the source. Each film has, among others, a Year property. All goes fine with the default setting but when I set the page size for entity sets, config.SetEntitySetPageSize("*", 100), the order of returned films are not good. Doesn't matter if the result set has less than 100, they are not properly ordered from more recent to less, how it was returned when the page size restriction wasn't present.
I don't know if this is a WCF Data Service bug or if I'm missing some configuration here. Any help to clarify this will be appreciated.
This is actually by design. The way the server driven paging (SetEntitySetPageSize enables it) is implemented requires a stable (and well known) order of the results.
So the service will order the results of your service operation (it does that with entity sets as well) by all the key properties on the given entity.
The client can influence the ordering to some extent - if there's an $orderby on the request the resulting order will be the application of $orderby followed by all the key properties.
Currently there's no way on the server to prescribe the order for either entity set or service operation such that the processing of server driven paging would take it into considertation the same way it does with $orderby from the client.
You can either make your client add the right $orderby or if that's not possible the only other workaround I can think of is to inject the $orderby into the URL before it gets processed by WCF Data Service (this can be done through a custom host, special headers, WCF, ... depends on how exactly you host the service and such). But that's a bit hacky and requires you to semi-parse the URL to be able to recognize any existing $orderby already there.
Note that this behavior is not only for server driven paging, also $top and $skip will reorder the results to maintain a stable ordering.
I'm starting to design a wcf service bus that is small now but will grow as our business grow so I'm concerned about some grwoing problems and also trying not to YAGNI too much. It's a e-commerce platform. The problem is I'm having too many second thoughts about where to put stuff. I will give a scenario to demonstrate all my questions.
We have an e-commerce website that sells products and ultimately deliveries them. For this we have a PlaceOrder service which, among other parameters, expects an Address object that in this context (our website placing an order) is made of City, Street and ZipCode.
We also do business with partners that use our platform only to sell products. They take care of the delivery. For this scenario we have a PlaceOrderForPartner service that, among other objects, expects an Address object. However, in this context (partner placing an order) the Address object is made of different information that is relevant only to a order placed by partner.
Given this scenario I have several questions:
1) How to organize this DataContracts objects in namespaces and folders in my Solution? I thought about having a folder per-context (Partner, Customer, etc) to keep the services and the DataContracts.
So I would have
- MySolution.sln
- Partner (folder)
- PartnetService.svc
- DataContracts (folder)
- Address
- Customer (folder)
- Customer.svc
- DataContracts (folder)
- Address
Using this way I would have a namespace to place all my context-specific datacontracts.
2) What about service design? Should I create a service for each one that might place and order and create a PlaceOrder method inside it like this:
Partner.svc/PlaceOrder
Customer.svc/PlaceOrder
or create an Order service with PlaceOrderForPartner and PlaceInternalOrder like this:
Order.svc/PlaceOrderForPartner
Order.svc/PlaceOrderForCustomer
3) Assuming that I pick the first option in the last question, what should I do with the operations that are made on the order and common to Partner and Customer?
4) Should I put DataContracts and Service definition in the same assembly? One for each? Everything with the service implementation?
5) How to name input and output messages for operations? Should I use the entities themselves or go for OperationNameRequest and OperationNameResponse template?
Bottom line my great question is: How to "organize" the datacontracts and services involved in a service creation?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this!
Besides what TomTom mentioned, I would also like to add my 2 cents here:
I like to structure my WCF solutions like this:
Contracts (class library)
Contains all the service, operations, fault, and data contracts. Can be shared between server and client in a pure .NET-to-.NET scenario
Service implementation (class library)
Contains the code to implement the services, and any support/helper methods needed to achieve this. Nothing else.
Service host(s) (optional - can be Winforms, Console App, NT Service)
Contains service host(s) for debugging/testing, or possibly also for production.
This basically gives me the server-side of things.
On the client side:
Client proxies (class library)
I like to package my client proxies into a separate class library, so that they can be reused by multiple actual client apps. This can be done using svcutil or "Add Service Reference" and manually tweaking the resulting horrible app.config's, or by doing manual implementation of client proxies (when sharing the contracts assembly) using ClientBase<T> or ChannelFactory<T> constructs.
1-n actual clients (any type of app)
Will typically only reference the client proxies assembly, or maybe the contracts assembly, too, if it's being shared. This can be ASP.NET, WPF, Winforms, console app, other services - you name it.
That way; I have a nice and clean layout, I use it consistently over and over again, and I really think this has made my code cleaner and easier to maintain.
This was inspired by Miguel Castro's Extreme WCF screen cast on DotNet Rocks TV with Carl Franklin - highly recommended screen cast !
You start wrong on th highest level.
It should not be "PlaceOrder" service, but "OrderManager". Maybe you want to add more service functions later - like inquiring for orders, cancel orders, change orders - who knows. In general, I would keep the number of "services" (.svc) small and add methods there. Otherwise you end up with a HUGH overhead for using them, in code - without any real benefit.
Why separate between partners and customers? I am sure with 15 minutes of data design, you could break things down to exactly ONE data structure so you could have only one service. If not... make that two methods on one interface, limit by security. But I seriously would NOT like two programs for that. Rather have two address fields - "Address" and "PartnerInfo", and only one can be set (other has to be null), checked in the logic.
Separate out into two projects. Interfaces, data contracts go into a separate project (blabalbla.Api) so that customers can actually get the DLL if they want - at least it makes things a lot easier on your end, you can rely on "shared type", no need to generate the wrappers internally. Allows a lot better testing (as sub-projets dont forget to regenerate the wrappers.... which may lead to errors when testing them).
I always put the implementation into a "blabla.Service" project. Url would be "Services.blabla.com/" in a subdomain (or "api.blabla.com", depends mostly on mood, but lately I am going for api mostly) - separates thigns out from the main website.
I came across this question recently, could anyone please help me what should be my approach as a tester.
Suppose, there is a webservice whose functionality have been changed and there is no documentation available of the same. What will be your approach to test the same?
Update: Does the same answer hold if Database functionality changed and no documentation.
It seems you might be asking one of two different questions:
1) How to discover the API of a black-box web service.
In this case, the best source would be the source of the web-service (with the existence failure of the documentation), alternatively look at existing clients, or the ?wsdl of the service.
2) How to discover what are correct and incorrect responses from the web service.
For this you need either requirements, or documentation, or correct clients. Probably the most likely to exist in this case is a client. Alternatively the web-service might be implementing some function the results of which can be confirmed externally.
You can't test something with no documentation. How would you know what results to expect?
Maybe you're looking for "documentation" in the wrong place. Somebody made these changes. They had some information telling them what changes to make to the database and to the service. There may even be a requirements document, but maybe also some design documents.
Get those, and use them to figure out what changed. Use that information to decide how to change your tests.
If you are using the service in a useful way, then presumably you have some calls which return some known results, even though this may not be documented. If this is the case then I would write tests which validate my expectations of the service as it is currently. Then at least if changes are made you'll have more chance of knowing which bits have changed that affect you.
Generally speaking, a web service provides a consistent contract between the providing service and callers. It specifies that whilst the back-end implementation might change, the interface for the service will remain consistent.
If you are interested in discovering what functions are available for the service, it may well provide metadata that documents it's available functions and message types. Usually, this is accessible by appending "?wsdl" to the web service URL, although other schemes exist.
Once you have a good idea of the available functions, you can begin to invoke them through your testing framework and evaluating the responses in accordance with your usual test processes.