WSE 2.0: SoapService and XmlSerialization
If you cut your teeth building Web services with ASP.NET, then you've become quite
accustomed to the developer productivity that results from the automatic serialization
of types to/from the <soap:Body>. Simply
declare your method to accept and return the data type of choice, and the underlying
infrastructure automagically takes care of serialization for you.
Unfortunately, all of the examples within the WSE 2.0 documentation show methods declared
with the SoapMethodAttribute as taking a SoapEnvelope as an argument and returning
a SoapEnvelope as a return value. If
you're at all like me, programmatically creating your SOAP envelopes, along with the
<soap:Body>, isn't your idea of developer productivity, and you can't fathom
trading all of the power of ASP.NET and it's support of automatic serialization in
WebMethods for the supposedly "new and improved" feature set of WSE.
However, while working on my MSMQ transport provider for WSE 2.0, I came across a
poorly documented feature of SoapService. You
can declare your SoapMethod to accept and return custom data types, and the WSE infrastructure
will take care of serializing those types to/from the <soap:Body>, just like
a WebMethod in ASP.NET. For example,
you can derive from SoapService and implement your SoapMethod like:
class MySoapService : SoapService
{
[SoapMethod("SomeMethod")]
public MyReturnType
SomeMethod(MyArgs args)
{
}
}
The other side of this equation is equally true. SoapClient
provides two overloads each for SendOneWay and SendRequestResponse. One
of the overloads accepts an object as opposed to a SoapEnvelope, and will automatically
serialize the object into the <soap:Body> of the request, thereby providing
you an easy way to send custom data types between your SoapClient and the remote SOAP-based
service.
class MySoapClient : SoapClient
{
public MySoapClient(Uri
to) : base(to)
{
}
public MyReturnType
SomeMethod(MyArgs args)
{
return
this.SendRequestResponse("SomeMethod", args);
}
}
Once again, the beauty of the .NET Framework comes shining through in it's ability
to support XML serialization for any and all types, built-in or custom. You
don't have to give this one thought - it just works.
You can also see this demonstrated in some of the WSE 2.0 samples, notably TcpSyncStockService. Hopefully,
this will be more fully documented by release. Until
then, it's called out here in an attempt to make your life a little easier when working
with WSE.