Question

I need to accept various profiles as an input to the web service.

[DataContract]
public class ProfileRequest
{
    [DataMember]
    public virtual string address { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public virtual string type { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public virtual string speed { get; set; }
}

I was thinking of using an IList of profiles like this:

[OperationContract]
IList<ProfileRequest> profiles

It occurs to me… perhaps IList doesn’t exist in all languages, so would be considered bad practice to expose a data contract like this? Should I stick only to simple types, so that the service can be more easily used by non WCF services?

Answer 1

this is fine. for example the following c# contract:

[DataMember]
    public List<CompositeType> StringValue
    {
        get { return stringValue; }
        set { stringValue = value; }
    }

will appear like this xml schema in the wsdl:

<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:tns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/" elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/">
<xs:complexType name="CompositeType">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" name="BoolValue" type="xs:boolean"/>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" name="StringValue" nillable="true" type="tns:ArrayOfCompositeType"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:element name="CompositeType" nillable="true" type="tns:CompositeType"/>
<xs:complexType name="ArrayOfCompositeType">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" name="CompositeType" nillable="true" type="tns:CompositeType"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:element name="ArrayOfCompositeType" nillable="true" type="tns:ArrayOfCompositeType"/>
</xs:schema>

so this is just an array for consumers. of course if you target for interoperability with a specific client stack you should proactively verify interoperability.