Question

I have a service stack service with the following request and response classes in the same namespace

public class GetContactMasterData
{

}

public class GetContactMasterDataResponse
{
    public IdDescription[] EntityTypes { get; set; }
    public IdDescription[] NameTypes { get; set; }
    public IdDescription[] AddressTypes { get; set; }
    public ResponseStatus MyResponseStatus { get; set; }
}

I tested the service successfully using soapUI. This is the response

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">    
   <s:Body>
      <GetContactMasterDataResponse xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.servicestack.net/types">
         <AddressTypes>
            <IdDescription>
               <Description>Home</Description>
               <Id>1</Id>
            </IdDescription>
            ...
         </AddressTypes>
        <EntityTypes>
           <IdDescription>
              <Description>Corporation</Description>
              <Id>1</Id>
           </IdDescription>
           ... 
        </EntityTypes>
        <MyResponseStatus i:nil="true" />
        <NameTypes>
           <IdDescription>
              <Id>4</Id>
              <Description>Other</Description>
           </IdDescription>
           ...
        </NameTypes>
      </GetContactMasterDataResponse>
   </s:Body>
</s:Envelope>

When I create a console app to test this service the service reference generates a proxy object. This is how intellisense guides you to call the GetContactMasterData method

GetContactMasterData(out IdDescription[], out ResponseStatus myResponseStatus, out IdDescription[] NameTypes):IdDescription[] addressTypes

My question is:
Why do EntityTypes and NameTypes become out parameters vs addressTypes becomes the return type of the method?

Answer 1

Included in ServiceStack’s SOAP Support wiki are limitations to be mindful of with SOAP:

Since VS.NET’s Add Service Reference is optimized for consuming .asmx
or WCF RPC method calls it doesn’t properly support multiple return
values (e.g. when you also want a ResponseStatus property) where it
will generate an ugly proxy API complete with out parameters.

If you want to ensure a pretty proxy is generated you should only have
1 first-level property which contains all the data you want to return.