Is there some way that I can get list of all the WCF restful services operations at client side( something like helpEnabled).
I tried to use http://servername/service/help, but it returns complete html. I want to get the operations suported by the service in the program.
I want to list all the operations supported by the service.
Is there any way to do it?
The short answer: It depends on what the creator of the service you are trying to consume has exposed.
There are two sides to this particular "issue". One side states that you should be able to hit a GET endpoint and then follow links (often ATOM PUB, esp. for the REST in Practice crowd). The other is pushing WADL, a REST analog to WSDL (SOAP Services). In the first camp, there is no map and the service works more like a website. In the second, you have a description of all services.
Related
What is the difference between WCF Services and Web Services in .netWhen should I use WCF and when to use Web Services.Is REST and WCF service the same? Thanks
Web Service is an abstract term encompassing a large variety of data providers for distributed systems. Perhaps you are referring to ASMX web services, which can still be found in the wild but aren't really widely used in new development these days.
WCF Service is Microsoft's implementation of SOAP. There are others implementations or you could roll your own (not recommended).
SOAP is a kind of stateful, session-based, message-based web service. It's good if your service is designed as a set of complex actions.
REST is a stateless, sessionless, resource-based web service. It's good if your service is designed to access data and perform simple CRUD operations on it. SOAP and REST are mutually exclusive. A service cannot be both. There are ways to manipulate vanilla WCF to make is RESTful but these techniques are becoming deprecated. If you want to implement a RESTful web service there are two main choices in the Microsoft world: WCF Data Services and ASP.NET Web API.
REST is an architecture
WCF is a API in .NET Framework to build connected service oriented application.
In olden days a functionality developed as Web Service was accessible via internet and the same to be available on local network was available via Remoting.
Using WCF we don't need to develop different code for it to be accessible over internet and on local network. Just configuring it with bindings would be enough.
That is a very wide question...I am going to just give a brief high-level answer and suggest that you do some more searching as there are is already a lot written on each subject. But, hopefully this should give you a push in the right direction.
First, typically when people refer to WCF Services and Web Services, they are referring to the newer WCF conventions that make service calls fairly generic (they can be SOAP, REST, etc) and the old .asmx SOAP method of Web Services. So, along these lines, I would suggest looking more into WCF and SOAP/.ASMX for the difference of WCF and older Web Services.
As to WCF and REST, they are not the same. REST is more of an architecture, whereas WCF is a framework. As I already mentioned, WCF can be used to make SOAP calls or REST calls. I am not sure I can add much more without going into greater detail.
I will see if I can find some good articles on REST and WCF a little later, though. Personally, I do not see a reason to even pursue very far into the older way of calling web services (.ASMX pages) as WCF has pretty much made that obsolete. However, learning many different ways to skin a cat can be useful in an endeavor to find what fits you best.
Again, this is VERY high level, but these are very general topics with a lot surrounding each, so hopefully a high level overview will help direct you in studying deeper on each subject.
Some people mean "ASMX" when they say "Web Services".
Others just use "Web Services" to mean the generic technology, and consider WCF to be the current way to create Web Services on the .NET platform. The other kind are "ASMX Web Services", as distinguished from "WCF Web Services".
The "other kind" are a legacy technology, supported only for backwards compatibility. They should not be used for new development, so there's no point in you learning about them.
As others have stated, "REST" is an architecture style, not a technology.
WCF is multifaceted, so I'm going to speak of it with respect to its most common usage. The general difference between WCF and REST services is centered around the content. A REST call is usually more message/document/entity centered (With customer entities, find those starting with M; With order entities, get order 12 and is tied to the HTTP protocol. WCF tends to be more operation centered (Invoke find operation with params, Invoke get operation with parameters). WCF also isn't tied to HTTP.
FYI, there are extensions to create REST based services using WCF (WebInvoke, WebGet attributes).
Wcf:wcf is a technology as part of .net framework which provides environment to work with different distributed technologies an by following unified programming model.
wcf create a proxy.
wcf support data contract serializer.
records shown xml format.
**Rest:**Rest is an architectural style.which says use the existing features of the web in more effective,efficiency and simple manner.verbs like insert,update and delete.
Rest cannot create a proxy.
rest records shown jason format.
Web Service:a service which is hosted on website is called as webservice.
web service support xmlserializer
I see this is quite an old thread, but I have asked a similar question recently.
The answers given have all similar relevance, but in my opinion Ray was the closest to what was actually asked.
When designing or refactoring a web based solution, you always get the question should we go with SOAP or REST. The answer lies in the complexity of the business logic required behind the service. REST is good for simplistic API calls that usually contains small sets of requested data or over night processing with large sets, but mainly for data requests. SOAP is more of an interactive day to day service with business logic as well. For example many methods with plenty of parameters.
What we do as part of our web based solution, is to try and make use of both. For internal methods and primary functionalities we use SOAP, but for exposed APIs we prefer REST.
Framework related, definitely WCF as preferred choice, irrespective if SOAP or REST.
Is it possible to use oData with a WCF service application but not use WCF Data Services?
It will be great if someone could shed more light on oData. I have done some Googling on this topic, but whenever I search for "wcf odata", I get information about WCF Data Services.
Any help/links will be appreciated.
WCF Data Services is the Microsoft implementation of the general OData protocol. As such, only WCF Data Services are / support / implement OData - a "normal" WCF service does not (and can not).
You might need to elaborate exactly why you feel the need or urge to use OData but not use WCF Data Services. What's the issue / problem you have with that setup? WHY do you want to use only a "normal" WCF service??
Update: ok, so you want to have services that expose data in different fashions and with different methods. What you could do is create a regular WCF service that's exposing both SOAP endpoints as well as a webHttpBinding REST endpoint. This will work - but then it's a "regular" WCF service, with methods that take parameters and return some data structure. This is not WCF Data Service (OData).
OData is more of a "here's my data collection, you can browse around in it" kind of approach - it's more about exposing an entire data model to the outside world using REST. This doesn't mix and match with SOAP - which is a lot more procedure-oriented, e.g. LoadCustomer, SaveInvoice and so forth.
So while it's absolutely possible to have procedure-oriented WCF services exposing both SOAP and REST endpoints at the same time, I don't really see how you can mix and match the "expose-this-resource" kind of approach for WCF Data Services / OData with a SOAP binding - this just doesn't work, I believe.
So if you must expose your data model of WCF Data Services (OData), you will need to author a second, pretty different looking regular WCF services for the SOAP clients, that might be based on the same data in the end (access the same database, for instance), but it's "face" will look quite different.
There is a new(ish) project from Microsoft called WCF WebApi (NuGet Package), which is simplifying doing RESTful WCF. It really takes to heart the "Representation" part of REST, so that you can expose your data in many representations (JSON, XML, oData, PNG, etc) based on content negotiation (or optionally whatever convention you want) all from the same service contract operation. Currently baked into the framework is the ability to support oData GET queries, by simply returning a collection .AsQueryable().
While this isn't a pure WCF/oData solution, as your question is speaking to, I thought I would mention the project in case it fit your specific requirements. The current Go-Live licensing might prove prohibitive, as might the "preview" status of this code; but if not, this may be a solution for you.
* UPDATE * This project was rolled into ASP.NET (usually in conjunction with ASP.NET MVC) and is no longer under the WCF team. The new product is called ASP.NET WebAPI.
I am new to REST. I was reading many article about REST. Still I am confused and do not know exact reason when we should go for REST rather than WCF traditional services.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, see this question which has pointers to many other interesting posts on WCF and REST. In terms of whether or not you need to expose a RESTful service at all, that depends on your application.
If you are building a public API, using REST with JSON or XML is popular in part because it's a very generic way to expose an API since clients don't generally need to generate code to use your API. Whereas with something like SOAP, code generation for the client is a lot more standard. If your clients are javascript, for instance, it's quite easy to use a RESTful service. If your API is only for internal consumption (i.e. you own the client and the server), then the benefits of REST are somewhat diminished, and it may be easier to use something like WCF.
In general, REST is a good choice when you don't mind being limited to HTTP, your service endpoints can be described well using RESTful concepts, you don't need a contract (like a WSDL), and when you don't want to worry that a client of your service won't be supported for technical reasons.
I've used RESTful web services as a reference in the past, it's a great book.
Assume a situation where a data will never be queried directly. AKA, there will always be some filtering logic and/or business logic that must occur.
When is a good reason to use data services outside of ajax/js?
Please don't site this page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx
Your essentially asking what layer of abstraction should I use, WCF Data Services is built on top of WCF and aims to simplify the process of creating a REST based service that is consumable by anything on the web. It takes away a lot of the plumbing and configuration required to do this with a standard WCF service. The querying feature is another big plus and something that is difficult to get right with standard WCF.
So in short:
If you want to quickly build a loosely typed service that wraps an existing data model and enables querying support give WCF Data Services a go.
If you want full control over the service contract or the flexibility of exposing the service over any protocol, stick with plain old WCF.
Is it possible to consume a JSON enabled WCF Web Service from a standard Proxy Client (i.e. not JavaScript)?
Basically I want to minimize the payload size between 2 web services.
Yes, it is, if the service interface definition on the client side is setup correctly (i.e. the RequestFormat/ResponseFormat properties of the WebGet/WebInvoke attribute on the operation contracts are set to Json. Also remember you'll need to use the WebHttp or WebScriptEnabled behaviors on your client.
Notice that JSon won't necessarily be most efficient given the current implementation in WCF; there are definite trade offs you'll be making. There's a good overview of it on this article.