Question

I am using automapper to map a master class to various child classes.

Example: I have a class called VitalStatistics (master class). This class holds all fields for a record.

The company business rules indicate that only certain fields are needed based on the State location.
So, California may not all 20 fields found in the master class and may need only 10 fields instead of the 20. So I use automapper to map the VitalStatis class data to the CAVitalStats class which has only 10 fields. The TXVitalStats class may only have 3 fields. etc..

My web services need to return a type that these classes have in common. E.g. IVitalStatistics interface.

It seems as though the WCF service does not like an interface declared as the return type.
So, how can I get the service to return CAVitalStats or TXVitalStats? Normally if these both were of the same interface type then this would work because they all would be of type IVitalStatistics but the serialization messaging rules appear to have a problem with returning interface types.

I hope this made sense. Thanks

Answer 1

If you have CAVitalStats and TXVitalStats both inheriting from the same base class, for instance ‘VitalStatsBase’, then your service method could return VitalStatsBase.

To make this work with your 2 subclasses you’ll need to use the KnownTypeAttribute in your service.

Below is a link describing the KnownTypeAttribute.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms730167.aspx