Question

I have an existing WCF service. At some point, sometimes an [OperationContract] or a [DataMember] in a data contract becomes [Obsolete]. I don’t want to remove the method, for back-wards compatibility reasons. Another example is sometimes I have an Enum, and want to [Obsolete] one of the choices, but I can’t completely remove it because items already exist in the system / database that contain that value.

Anyway, is there a way to omit certain items from the generated WDSL? For example:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IMyService
{
    [OperationContract]
    string SomeMethod(string x);  // I do want this in the WSDL

    [Obsolete]
    [OperationContract]
    string OldMethod(string x); // I do NOT want this in the WSDL, but I do want it to still work / be callable if an older system tries to call it.
}

Answer 1

There isn’t anything out-of-the-box which can be used to do that, but you can use a WSDL export extension to remove some of the operations from the service metadata. I implemented a sample for this scenario at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlosfigueira/archive/2011/10/06/wcf-extensibility-wsdl-export-extension.aspx.