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Asked: 2026-06-09T18:13:14+00:00

I need to develop a webservice which will be exposed to a java client

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I need to develop a webservice which will be exposed to a java client over SOAP. We have a well defined schema in place which we use to communicate between both the systems. Now I need to expose an operation on my WCF contract which takes the Schema object and store it inside our DB.

I have followed the following for developing the webservice.

  • Host it over basichttp in wcf
  • Create an object model of the schema using xsd.exe
  • Take the schema as a parameter on the operation something like DoThis(SchemaObject schema)

Since this is going to be exposed in WCF, I have gone and modified the xsd tool generated object model. Our schema has mutiple level of nesting, and is a combination of 4 different schema linked together. The object graph generated by xsd tool has abstract classes, inheritence etc.

For this to work, I have gone and defined DataContract attrbute on everyclass and added the namespace to it, which was already there in the XmlTypeAttribute. Also I have added DataMemebers to each properties.

Some of the properties in the schema are arrays which was defined by the tool using xmlarrayitem attribute.

Now when I send a request using SOAP UI, the object is not getting deserialized as expected. Almost all the fields are coming as null, which has some sort of inheritence hierarchy. I have added KnownType attribute to the appropriate datacontracts, but still not working.

My question is:

  • Is this the right way to develop a webservice.

  • Is there a way to avoid putting the datacontract and data members and just work witht he serialization attributes added by the xsd tool?

  • Is it necessary to use datacontract attribute, will it not work with the xmlserialization attributes as it works inthe case xml deserialization?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    WCF supports two types of serialization – DataContractSerializer and XmlSerializer.

    XSD.exe generates strong type entities with all necessary XmlSerializer attributes. You do not need to add any DataContract or DataMemeber attributes to work with generated classes in WCF.

    See MSDN for more details – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733901.aspx

    Be also very careful with your entities generated by xsd.exe. As you probably already seen WCF server will eat many serialization changes you can do in these files but that will be breaking change for clients because they relay on XSD.

    If possible I would remain these auto-generated entities without changes to guarantee that interface is not broken. You may introduce separate DTO classes for using in Business Layer. You can implement inheritence hierarchy over there.

    Bunch of Unit Tests can help if you feel that auto-generated classes need to be changed. These Test Cases should generate different data sets, serialize them into XML and check that XML over XSD.

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