Question

I created(in last stage) a ASP.NET website which requires database communications, So we created WCF services to connect to the database. If there is a Select statement those service returns DataTable.

Services are working fine and website also working fine

At the time of API creation i don’t know that windows phone sdk does not support the DataTables.

I read some where that Windows Phone SDK doesn’t support DataTable, i checked in my Visual Studio also there is no class called DataTable in System.Data namespace.

I am new to Windows Phone.

But now we want to create a WINDOWS PHONE APP which also works same as Website, so we want to use the existing API(WCF Service).

is there is any way to accomplish this task. most of the methods return type is DataTable.

we don’t want to create two API’s(means services). What should I do?

How to create a Service which works for both Windows Phone and Website.

we are ready to change the change the API and according to that ready to update Website also?

thanks

Answer 1

Just changed the API to return Stream instead of DataTable

 System.IO.StringWriter reader = new System.IO.StringWriter();
 dt.WriteXml(reader, XmlWriteMode.WriteSchema);//dt is datatable
 return reader;

in website small minor changes, reading the stream and assign it to a datatable

    StringReader xmlReader = new StringReader(stream);
    DataTable dt = new DataTable();
    dt.ReadXml(xmlReader);

Update:

This approach is not suggestible(this was my first web service application), I suggest to use JSON/XML responses(with returning DTOs) instead of returning DataTable..

Following links might land you in right direction.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/105273/Create-RESTful-WCF-Service-API-Step-By-Step-Guide
http://mono.servicestack.net/ServiceStack.Hello/