Retrieve configuration bindings WCF - wcf-binding

I have a service that exposes multiple endpoints. One beeing wsHttp and the other Net.Tcp. Is there any way I can know which one the clients used to make the call inside the service method ?
Thanks !

You can use the OperationContext object to retrieve the channel information
if (OperationContext.Channel.LocalAddress.Uri.Scheme == Uri.UriSchemeHttp)
{
// Called by wsHTTP
}
else if (OperationContext.Channel.LocalAddress.Uri.Scheme == Uri.UriSchemeNetTcp)
{
// Called by NetTcp
}
...

Yes. If you look at the following property you should be able to tell where things came in from.
OperationContext.Current.EndpointDispatcher.EndpointAddress

Related

Proxy generated for WCF creating Message Contracts

I'm consuming a WCF service in my project for which I've added the reference using 'Add Service Reference...'. I expected it to generate a clean proxy with a ServiceClient entity and the Interface. Instead, I see that it has created a MethodNameRequest, MethodNameRequestBody, MethodNameResponse, MethodNameResponseBody entities for each OperationContract method.
So while invoking the service methods, the proxy passes to the service method an instance of MethodNameRequest with the input parameters of the method as the properties of the RequestBody. See below an example of a call to AboutInformationGet() method which doesn't accept any parameters.
public WCFDynamicInvocation.PostingService.AboutModel AboutInformationGet() {
WCFDynamicInvocation.PostingService.AboutInformationGetRequest inValue = new WCFDynamicInvocation.PostingService.AboutInformationGetRequest();
inValue.Body = new WCFDynamicInvocation.PostingService.AboutInformationGetRequestBody();
WCFDynamicInvocation.PostingService.AboutInformationGetResponse retVal = ((WCFDynamicInvocation.PostingService.IMIGQPosting)(this)).AboutInformationGet(inValue);
return retVal.Body.AboutInformationGetResult;
}
I believe this behavior is what one would expect to see in a Webservice Proxy. Hence I suspect that the WCF service is not properly configured.
Did someone here face this issue? What would be the change to be done at the service so that the proxy generated is similar to the WCF service.
Cheers.
There is a similar post here.
Right click your service reference -> Configure service reference... -> Check if "Always generate message contracts" check box is checked. Uncheck it and hit OK to regenerate the proxy to see if you get a normal proxy.
After struggling with this for some time, I've finally found that the cause for the message contracts in the proxy was the service interface had the following attribute:
[XmlSerializerFormat(Use = OperationFormatUse.Literal, Style = OperationFormatStyle.Document)]
As I understand, I could decorate the DataContracts with the following attribute to avoid wrapping
[MessageContract(IsWrapped = false)]
but the response still gets wrapped as the OperationContract hasn't been modified.
As there were no particular need to use XMLSerializer in place of WCF's default DataContractSerializer, we would remove the XmlSeralizerFormat decoration.

WCF service access for redunancy (failover)

I'm looking for the correct way to have redundancy for a WCF service. I think I'm trying to solve a "infrastructure" issue in code. I'm not up to speed on load balancers but it seems like there should be something like routers to exactly this.
// Cycle through the list of service.
foreach (var uri in InfrastructureInformation.ServiceUris)
{
try
{
using (var client = WcfClientFactory.Create<ServiceClient>(uri))
{
// Do stuff here.
}
}
catch
{
// todo: Do not catch "exception" here. We have to find a better way of doing this.
// Try the next URI.
}
}
Seems like there should be a way to have one URI that I could hit that some "balancer" would hand off to an available service. If one service goes down for maintenance then the balancer would just not give any request to that service.
Now I know about WCF routing and I thought well that's the answer. Just put up a WCF router and have it hand out the connection but what happens if it falls over? Doesn't this give you a single point of failure? I'm looking for something more industrial.
WCF in .NET 4.0 has a routing capability that can be used in a failover scenario like you describe. This WCF sample shows how the built-in RoutingService class can be used for this purpose.
You could have a look at Microsoft Network Load Balancing (aka NLB). Microsoft also mention this in the context of WCF. There is an article on this here.

dynamically read web service methods

Is there a way to read the web service methods dynamically using a program? I have a windows forms app that should be able to read the list of methods and display them. I have added a service reference to my project but need help to read the list of web methods or operations (WCF).
Answer:
Here is the piece of code just in case anyone is looking for it.
MethodInfo[] methods = typeof(MyClass).GetMethods(BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.Instance);
if (methods != null && methods.Length > 0)
{
foreach (MethodInfo m in methods)
{
foreach (object o in m.GetCustomAttributes(false))
{
// To identify the method
if (o.GetType().Name.Equals("SoapDocumentMethodAttribute"))
{
// Get Name using m.Name
}
}
}
}
Alternatively, if you need to read the methods of a service on-the-fly, this article may be of interest to you, as it illustrates how to create a WCF proxy from WSDL.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vipulmodi/archive/2008/10/16/dynamic-proxy-and-memory-footprint.aspx
Then you can use reflection (as per Mike's suggestion) to read the list of service methods exposed by the service.
On your client side, since you already have a web reference type for the web service, you can just use reflection to list all the methods in the proxy client class.

Get listing of web services referenced in WCF application?

Could anyone out there give some pointers on how to go about getting a listing of all the web service references used by a WCF application - the pseudo code I'm envisioning might look something like:
For each ws in MyWebServices
Console.WriteLine("Service Name: " & ws.Name)
Next
How to build the MyWebServices object is what I am wondering?
Thanks
You should be able to do:
ClientSection clientSection = (ClientSection)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.serviceModel/client");
foreach(ChannelEndpointElement channelEndpointElement in clientSection.Endpoints)
{
// Use any of the channel endpoint element properties here:
// Address, BehaviorConfiguration, Binding, BindingConfiguration, Contract, etc.
}
You could just check the configuration file. All WCF services used by the application should be in the client section.

Force WCF to call a method on every request before entering actual function

I have a RESTful WCF service with many different functions. For each function I need to call an authentication method that I have written. I can manually call this method on every request but I was looking for a way to force the WCF engine to call this method before these functions are entered. Does anyone know if this is possible?
Cheers
You could use the "Custom Behavior" approach.
You would need to write a Class that implements IDispatchMessageInspector. The following MSDN magazine article gives a nice explanation of this: Extending WCF with Custom Behaviors (link points to Wayback Machine cached copy; downloads likely don't work).
To force WCF REST Service to first call a method especially if it's for authorization
customize/override CheckAccessCore method of System.ServiceModel.ServiceAuthorizationManager
refer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731774(v=vs.110).aspx
If it's for authorization, can't you use the built in services?
For instance, there is the PrincipalPermission attribute. Does that help in your case?
You could think about creating a WCF routing service. You would call a fixed endpoint - your authentication method - and then from there on, route your calls to the actual methods, based on some indication in the request.
For .NET 4, the Routing Service functionality will be included into WCF out of the box.
What I don't know is how that all matches REST, though.
I came across this post, while searching for the same thing.None of the answer's were simple/quick solution so if you just want a function to be called before every method then you can do what i just did:
I created a zero argument constructor:
public class myService : ImyService
{
myService ()
{
ConnectToDatabAse();
FunctionYouWantToCallBeforeEveryMethodCall();
//Add here more
}
}