Include enum in service reference - wcf

I have an enum that I use for processing logic flags and I would like to expose the processing logic through a WCF service to a Silverlight client.
First problem is that if I use Option1 | Option2 (bit flags) the serializer has a problem as the sum of the two options do not equate to an enumerable option (as should be). I can overcome this by using an int as the parameter. This however gets met to my second problem: my enum is not included in the service reference as it is not a member of any type (DataContract).
I can overcome my second problem with a linked file but would prefer not to, or by creating a dummy method that returns the enum type, also not great.
Is there a simple way of desrializing the odd number, or injecting the enum type into the service reference? Or a better option all together?

For this you should use:
[DataContract(Name = "CarCondition")]
public enum CarConditionEnum
{
[EnumMember]
New,
[EnumMember]
Used,
[EnumMember]
Rental,
Broken,
Stolen
}
You can get more details here: MSDN.

I have just found a enum friend called [Flags] which allows me to use the enum as a parameter value and bit flags are deserialized correctly...

Related

Can we use [DataMember] instead of [ProtoMember] while use protobuf in WCF?

I've already a service working using the DataContract attributes. We would like to switch to the protobuf implementation, but if we have to change all the attributes, it would be a lot of hardwork.
Is it possible to NOT use the ProtoMember and ProtoContract and have ProtoBuf using the DataMember and DataContract attributes?
thanks
Sure; protobuf-net is perfectly happy with [DataContract] / [DataMember] as long as it can still get valid numbers, which it does by looking for the Order property of DataMemberAttribute.
There is, however, a small problem... tools like svcutil don't guarantee the actual numbers - just the order. This can make it problematic to ensure that you have the same numbers of both sides. In addition, svcutil tends to start at zero, not one - and zero is not a valid field number for protobuf. If the numbers you get all turn out to be off-by-one, then you can tweak this by adding a partial class in a seperate file with a fixup, for example:
[ProtoContract(DataMemberOffset = 1)]
partial class Whatever { }
However, if the numbers are now all over the place (because they weren't sequential originally), they you might want to either use multiple [ProtoPartialMember(...)] attributes to tell it how to map each one (remembering that you can use nameof rather than hard-coding the member names):
[ProtoContract]
[ProtoPartialMember(1, nameof(SomeStringValue))]
[ProtoPartialMember(2, nameof(WhateverId))]
partial class Whatever { }
or just share the original type definition, which might be easier.

How to convert existing POCO classes in C# to google Protobuf standard POCO

I have POCO classes , I use NewtonSoft json for seralization. Now i want to migrate it to Google protocol buff. Is there any way i can migrate all my classes (not manually) so that i can use google protocol buff for serialization and deseralization.
Do you just want it to work? The absolute simplest way to do this would be to use protobuf-net and add [ProtoContract(ImplicitFields = ImplicitFields.AllPublic)]. What this does is tell protobuf-net to make up the field numbers, which it does by taking all the public members, sorting them alphabetically, and just counting upwards. Then you can use your type with ProtoBuf.Serializer and it should behave in the way you expect.
This is simple, but it isn't very robust. If you add, remove or rename members it can all get out of sync. The problem here is that the protocol buffers format doesn't include names - just field numbers, and it is much harder to guarantee numbers over time. If your type is likely to change, you probably want to define field numbers explicitly. For example:
[ProtoContract]
public class Foo {
[ProtoMember(1)]
public int Id {get;set;}
[ProtoMember(2)]
public List<string> Names {get;} = new List<string>();
}
One other thing to watch out for would be non-zero default values. By default protobuf-net assumes certain things about implicit default values. If you are routinely using non-zero default values without doing it very carefully, protobuf-net may misunderstand you. You can turn that off globally if you desire:
RuntimeTypeModel.Default.UseImplicitZeroDefaults = false;

Datacontract and dynamic return type WCF

I have a ServiceContract which returns dynamic type and looks like following:
public dynamic LoginViaOpenId(string openIdUrl)
The dynamic return type could be a DataContract that I have defined, or a string. But since I have not used my DataContract on the service, client does not know anything about it and cannot access it.
My DataContract is something like below:
[DataContract]
public enum OpenIdStatus
{
[EnumMember]
Authenticated,
[EnumMember]
Authenticating,
[EnumMember]
Cancelled,
[EnumMember]
Failed,
[EnumMember]
RedirectToLogon
}
I know if I had hierarchical types I could have used KnownType to conquer this, but am out of idea for this scenario.
Any idea?
A dynamic DataContract is an oxymoron. A DataContract is a predetermined and mutually agreed-upon data structure, and dynamic is an object whose structure is not predetermined and thus cannot be agreed-upon, since it can be anything.
It doesn’t appear you actually need to return a dynamic data type, but rather a varying data type. The difference is that a varying data type is one of a set of fixed data types, whereas a dynamic data type is one which does not have a predetermined structure. Since your return value is one of several knows shapes, there is no need to use the "shapeless" (or "freeform") dynamic type, which isn't supported by WCF.
Instead, you could have the [OperationContract] method return a type with a [DataContract] that will act as a wrapper object that has a single data member of type object, and use [KnownType] on the wrapper object to specify the possible types that may be returned inside the wrapper. Since everything inherits from object, there is already a hierarchy in place.
[DataContract]
[KnownType(typeof(OpenIdStatus))]
[KnownType(typeof(string))]
public class ReturnValue
{
[DataMember]
public object Value { get; set; }
}
I think that WCF is going to have issues serializing / deserializing your dynamic type. I would recommend that you set up a contract for the method return based on a defined interface. Alternatively, you could take responsibility for the serialization yourself and make your service return a string. The client will have to have knowledge of what type to de-serialize the string to. There is a similar question on this here:-
How to return dynamic List from WCF HTTP Service

WCF Serialised List object giving strange names for objects

Here is the Method signature in the WCF service:
APIMessageList<APISimpleContact> GetMembers(string apiKey, APIContactSearchFilter filter);
APIMessageList inherits from IList. Once I have built a proxy against this WCF service the class name is APIMessageListOfAPISimpleContactjHldnYZV.
Why do I not get: APIMessageListOfAPISimpleContact?
It adds random text to the end of every APIMessageList object in the interface (there are several) They all end with the same few chars - jHldnYZV. I have looked online for possible causes, but I can't find any posts of people having this problem.
This is a purely cosmetic issue but this interface is exposed to our external customers so its appearance is important.
Anybody know why I am getting this problem?
Many thanks
Joe
Your solution will be at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731045.aspx. Basically, since you could have multiple "SimpleContract" classes (in different namespaces), WCF will add a disambiguation hash to the end of the contract name, which is what you have in the 8 chars at the end of the contract name. But you can control that, by using the CollectionDataContract and its Name property:
[CollectionDataContract(Name = "APIMessageListOfSimpleContract")]
public class APIMessageList : IList<SimpleContract> { ... }
We had a similar problem while using Generic types for return values. If we are not specifying a concrete type, the default data contract serializer or the WCF serializer is unable to infer the exact type of the returned entity. Hence it generates a random class name for the returned type.
In our project we overcame this problem by building a data contract which was of specific type and returned the same as a result of a WCF operation call.
My guess is that you are using a generic type and the serializer is unable to infer the type of the returned object.
I suggest you create a Data Transfer Object (DTO) and return the same from the WCF service. That should solve your problem.

SerializationException: type not included in serializable type set

In my Google Web Toolkit project, I got the following error:
com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.SerializationException: Type ‘your.class.Type’ was not included in the set of types which can be serialized by this SerializationPolicy or its Class object could not be loaded. For security purposes, this type will not be serialized.
What are the possible causes of this error?
GWT keeps track of a set of types which can be serialized and sent to the client. your.class.Type apparently was not on this list. Lists like this are stored in .gwt.rpc files. These lists are generated, so editing these lists is probably useless. How these lists are generated is a bit unclear, but you can try the following things:
Make sure your.class.Type implements java.io.Serializable
Make sure your.class.Type has a public no-args constructor
Make sure the members of your.class.Type do the same
Check if your program does not contain collections of a non-serializable type, e.g. ArrayList<Object>. If such a collection contains your.class.Type and is serialized, this error will occur.
Make your.class.Type implement IsSerializable. This marker interface was specifically meant for classes that should be sent to the client. This didn't work for me, but my class also implemented Serializable, so maybe both interfaces don't work well together.
Another option is to create a dummy class with your.class.Type as a member, and add a method to your RPC interface that gets and returns the dummy. This forces the GWT compiler to add the dummy class and its members to the serialization whitelist.
I'll also add that if you want to use a nested class, use a static member class.
I.e.,
public class Pojo {
public static class Insider {
}
}
Nonstatic member classes get the SerializationException in GWT 2.4
I had the same issue in a RemoteService like this
public List<X> getX(...);
where X is an interface. The only implementation did conform to the rules, i.e. implements Serializable or IsSerializable, has a default constructor, and all its (non-transient and non-final) fields follow those rules as well.
But I kept getting that SerializationException until I changed the result type from List to X[], so
public X[] getX(...);
worked. Interestingly, the only argument being a List, Y being an interface, was no problem at all...
I have run into this problem, and if you per chance are using JPA or Hibernate, this can be a result of trying to return the query object and not creating a new object and copying your relavant fields into that new object. Check the following out, which I saw in a google group.
#SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
public static List<Article> getForUser(User user)
{
List<Article> articles = null;
PersistenceManager pm = PMF.get().getPersistenceManager();
try
{
Query query = pm.newQuery(Article.class);
query.setFilter("email == emailParam");
query.setOrdering("timeStamp desc");
query.declareParameters("String emailParam");
List<Article> results = (List<Article>) query.execute(user.getEmail
());
articles = new ArrayList<Article>();
for (Article a : results)
{
a.getEmail();
articles.add(a);
}
}
finally
{
pm.close();
}
return articles;
}
this helped me out a lot, hopefully it points others in the right direction.
Looks like this question is very similar to what IsSerializable or not in GWT?, see more links to related documentation there.
When your class has JDO annotations, then this fixed it for me (in addition to the points in bspoel's answer) : https://stackoverflow.com/a/4826778/1099376