Question

i need to pass an unknown type from my client to a wcf service ,

the type is unknown to the service .

for instance i have a class Customer which i create an instance of serialize and send to the service , the problem arises when i need to deserialize i have to provide the type in order to cast the desrialized object to .

Type can’t be serialized , when attempted i get the following error :

{"Type 'System.RuntimeType' with data contract name 
 'RuntimeType:http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System' is not expected. Consider 
  using a DataContractResolver or add any types not known statically to the list of 
  known types - for example, by using the KnownTypeAttribute attribute or by adding 
  them to the list of known types passed to DataContractSerializer."}

i need to find a work around for this issue , any ideas ?

just to summarize :

i’m looking for a workaround for sending an unknown Type to a WCF service .

Answer 1

If the other end doesn’t know anything about it (comments), then you can’t possibly deserialize. You couldn’t do that even with Type-based serializers (BinaryFormatter/NetDataContractSerializer).

If you are sending completely foreign data, then you are basically limited to things like XML or JSON, and even then the meaning is slightly ambiguous (is <id>123<id> a string? int? float? long?).

WCF is not well suited to your scenario (nor most other contract-based stacks; most systems expect to be able to understand incoming data).