Question

I have a domain class User that has at least 20 properties, and it is from another library so it doesn’t have any contract decorations. When I return this over a WCF service as xml or json, its only bringing back like 3 of the properties. I thought maybe it was leaving out collections and whatnot, but even simple fields like Name and Email were not being returned at all.

So I guess my question is, can someone explain what exactly is being serialized and returned over the service? None of the properties are decorated with anything like [DataMember], yet some are serialized and returned while others are not. As I understand, it should automatically serialize all public properties. And on a side thought, if someone could point me in the right direction of how to add these declarations to an existing library to assist in the serialization, it would be appreciated.

UPDATE:
I was looking at the wsdl and found the reference to an xsd file (assumingly generated by the serializer). I noticed that I only has those 3 [mapping]
fields listed. not sure what this is or if I can mess with it.

Answer 1

It turns out that the reason these properties weren’t serializing is because they weren’t exactly public in that they were read-only. I actually had the properties set to:

public string MyProperty { get; internal set; }

I did this because I do use object initializers in my internal system classes (controller type stuff) and do not wish to allow the consumer to set these properties. I read that you can set them to protected and it will allow it to serialize, however this doesn’t work for my implementation.

These are POCO classes, so my solution (albeit not exactly an answer to the problem) was to create DTO classes. Since all of the properties in the DTOs were fully public, all I do is populate those with data from the POCO and return the dto. Everything gets serialized properly.