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Asked: 2026-05-19T22:04:34+00:00

I have several service contracts exposed over WCF, which use multiple datacontracts. The service

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I have several service contracts exposed over WCF, which use multiple datacontracts. The service is to be consumed by Adobe Flex. I’ve run into many problems getting Flex to consume the WSDL produced by the server. I used the procedure outlined here to squeeze the WSDL into a single file (I used FlatWsdl and not WcfExtras, if it matters).

Now I’m getting a bunch of errors when using VS2010’s own wsdl.exe tool to extract my metadata. Specifically, I’m getting the following errors:

1) Schema validation warning: Schema item 'complexType' named 
   'ArrayOfKeyValueOfSomeKeySomeValuep1alXzIb' from namespace 
   'http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/Arrays' is invalid. 
   Namespace 'http://My/Wcf/Namespace' is not available to be referenced
   in this schema.

2) Schema validation warning: Schema item 'complexType' named 'MyComplexType'
   from namespace 'http://My/Wcf/Namespace' is invalid. Namespace 
   'http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/My.Real.Namespace' is not available
   to be referenced in this schema.

Now, the Dictionary (“ArrayOfKeyValueOf…”) type is apparently defined in an external schema, which is not imported by my WSDL. Please note that SomeKey and SomeValue have a datacontract namespace of My/Wcf/Namespace.

As for MyComplexType, the weird thing is that if I change its Datacontract-namespace to the same namespace used by my services, servers, and bindings, then error (2) goes away. I can’t figure out why.

What I’m asking boils down to two questions:

1) How can I add an import directive of an external schema to my WSDL? I saw some solutions on-line that suggested writing a wrapper class around the containers. This is something I would really like to avoid.

2) Do I really have to put all my datacontracts into a single namespace? I don’t have any technical objection to doing it, but it’s going to be very cumbersome to modify the namespace of all datacontracts. Perhaps there’s an automated way of achieving this?

TIA!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    So just in case anyone else runs into the same problem with accessing a WCF (BasicHttpBinding) server from a Flex client:

    1) No, all DataContracts need not be in the same namespace (but all ServiceContracts, service implementations, and bindings do have to be in the same namespace!).

    2) The crux of the problem is that Flex expects each xsd:schema to have an “xsd:import namespace” for all the namespaces it references. This import should be of the form: 

    <xsd:import namespace="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/SomeNamespace" />

    There doesn’t seem to be a way to do this with WCF, since it automatically adds an auto-generated schemaLocation attribute to this tag, which makes Flex try to fetch this schemaLocation. The only workaround appears to be manually manipulating the WSDL at the XML level (e.g. by exposing a REST endpoint for retrieving the metadata).

    Thanks to Yaron Naveh in the MSDN WCF forums for his help. The discussion can be found at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/wcf/thread/b9429e30-e4d5-454f-9fbd-bae39990ff33.

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