Question

I’m experimenting with WCF RESTful web services and I’m having a problem with Auto-Implemented properties.

I have a class called DeviceDescriptor, defined as follows:

public class DeviceDescriptor
{
    public string DeviceId { get; set; }
    public string DisplayName { get; set; }
}

I have a RESTful WCF service that is supposed to return a List of DeviceDescriptors – here’s my service contract:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IChooser
{
[WebGet(UriTemplate="/Chooser/RegisteredDevices")]
[OperationContract]
List<DeviceDescriptor> RegisteredDevices();

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "/Chooser/Ping")]
[OperationContract]
string Ping();
}

Well, it sort of works, except that in the XML output, the property names don’t come out right, it looks like the serializer is using the “unutterable names” of the auto-generated backing fields instead of the property names. My output comes out like this:

<DeviceDescriptor>
  <_x003C_DeviceId_x003E_k__BackingField>Pipe.Dome</_x003C_DeviceId_x003E_k__BackingField> 
  <_x003C_DisplayName_x003E_k__BackingField>Pipe diagnostic tool</_x003C_DisplayName_x003E_k__BackingField> 
</DeviceDescriptor>

So, is there a way out of this? Why doesn;t WCF use the property names?

Answer 1

It uses reflection to get them IIRC, if you want more control you should try to use a DataContract, it allows you to specify the exact names (using [DataMember(Name = "DeviceID")]). See also the documentation on DataMemberAttribute