Question

I have a WSDL file on disk and loaded as a web reference. The problem is that the web reference itself is looking for the WSDL on my machine (using an absolute path), which obviously won’t work on teammates’ machines.

Is it possible to have the web reference look for the WSDL with a relative path, or from the Resources file? The WSDL is for a third-party service that we’ve modified to add some extra fields (per their recommendation).

Answer 1

When you add a service reference to the WSDL file on your machine, it gets copied into your “Service References” folder in your project. At that point, the API for your service is determined. There is a “Reference.svcmap” (XML) that is created that holds the location of the original location of the WSDL file. This is so that you can update the service reference in your project if the API changes. But, even without having that original WSDL file you can check in the code and your team can use it without issue. But, if you want them to be able to update the service if the API changes, then you need to actually host that WSDL file in a publicly accessible place. Usually, the web service itself provides the WSDL file and you wouldn’t have it on your file system. If you plan to update and change the web service, you should connect to the WSDL hosted on a development web server. That’s really where it belongs, and not a local file. But, there’s no reason your local file reference wouldn’t work just fine until someone tried to update it. If your web service never changes, you’ve got no problem. If it could change, then host it somewhere and reference a real URL.

My initial testing of tweaking the XML in Reference.svcmap file to try for relative path references did not work, but if you decide you really want to get this to work as your question describes, this is the place to make your attempt.