Question

I created a web service for which I am trying to provide 3 endpoints with different bindings.
1. basicHttpBinding,
2. wsHttpBinding,
3. webHttpBinding

When I make the service reference, I get only the endpoints with the basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding bindings created. I don’t get webHttpBinding. What could possibly wrong.

Here’s the structure of the serviceModel node in web.config.

  <system.serviceModel>
<diagnostics>
  <messageLogging logEntireMessage="true" logMessagesAtServiceLevel="true" logMessagesAtTransportLevel="true"/>
</diagnostics>
<services>
  <service behaviorConfiguration="VersionTolerance.Service1Behavior" name="BookShop.BookShopService">
    <endpoint address="sadha" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="BookShop.IBookShopService" />
    <endpoint address="ws" binding="wsHttpBinding" contract="BookShop.IBookShopService" >
    </endpoint>
    <endpoint address="web" binding="webHttpBinding" behaviorConfiguration="webHttpBehavior"
      contract="BookShop.IBookShopService" />
    <host>
      <baseAddresses>
        <add baseAddress="http://localhost:49654/" />
      </baseAddresses>
    </host>
  </service>
</services>
<behaviors>
  <serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="VersionTolerance.Service1Behavior">
      <!-- To avoid disclosing metadata information, set the value below to false and remove the metadata endpoint above before deployment -->
      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
      <!-- To receive exception details in faults for debugging purposes, set the value below to true.  Set to false before deployment to avoid disclosing exception information -->
      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>          
    </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>
  <endpointBehaviors>
    <behavior name="webHttpBehavior">
      <webHttp/>
    </behavior>
  </endpointBehaviors>
</behaviors>

Answer 1

There’s nothing wrong – that’s just the way it works!

basicHttpBinding and wsHttpBinding are SOAP bindings that expose metadata about their service – your Visual Studio Add Service Reference can interrogate their endpoints, find out what they’re called, what methods they offer, what data types they expect as parameters and what they return.

webHttpBinding is REST – and REST by default doesn’t have a concept of metadata – you won’t get a service description, list of methods etc. – REST is all about resources – not methods.

So therefore, when you do a Add Service Reference, you get proxy clients for the SOAP endpoints – but not for the REST / webHttpBinding endpoint. Works as designed.

The WCF Data Services – built on top of REST – offer a similar experience to the SOAP bindings, in that you can do an Add Service Reference and get a nice client side proxy and all – and this is done since the OData protocol defines a metadata exchange on top of REST. So if you can turn your REST service into a WCF Data Service, you’d be fine again.

Otherwise, with REST, you just have to “know” (from a documentation page or something) what the resource URI’s for your REST service are, and what the HTTP verbs do in your REST context.