WCF Datacontract - Does it support nullable data member? - wcf

Question

[DataMember]
public int? NumberOfPages; //////////// Is this supported????
[DataMember]
public bool? Color; //////////// Is this supported????
[DataMember]
public int? BulkQuantity;
[DataMember]

Answer 1

Yes, of course!
You should have no trouble whatsoever to create nullable data members, they'll be handled in the resulting WSDL/XSD as "xs:nillable=true" members. No problem at all.

Answer 2

Yes, please see Types Supported by the Data Contract Serializer:
Nullable types are fully supported by the data contract serializer.

Answer 3

#Kahoon and Batwad:
We solved this problem by using the nullable<> or ? type in two steps:
In the class containing the generic field, define the field as follows:
nullable<GenType> MyField {get; set;}
In the data contract that uses this baseclass, you can define which elements are known to the serializer/deserializer using some annotation-like tags. Here, we defined for example:
[Serializable]
[DataContract]
[KnownType(typeof(BaseClass<nullable<DateTime>>))]
Instead of BaseClass<nullable<DateTime>> you can use BaseClass<DateTime?>, I think.
After this, the serialization of generic null values worked for us.

Answer 4

In my case It looks like that the Nullable Integer passed in is treated as Empty String and NOT Null Value
So here is how I handle the nullable in the code
[XmlIgnore]
public int? NumberOfPagesCount{ get; set; }
[XmlElement("NumberOfPages")]
public string NumberOfPagesText
{
get { return this.NumberOfPagesCount.HasValue ? this.NumberOfPagesCount.Value.ToString("F2") : string.Empty; }
set
{
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(value))
{
this.NumberOfPagesCount= Convert.ToInt32(value);
}
else
{
this.NumberOfPagesCount= null;
}
}
}