Question

I’m getting this exception when calling my web service. I’m using EF in my service and trying to return a POCO class created by EF. Any ideas??

System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server was unable to
process request. —> System.InvalidOperationException: There
was an error generating the XML document. —>
System.InvalidOperationException: The type
System.Data.Entity.DynamicProxies.Job_3C04107CB03F22888B19EF7537A795C816D03441852DC37A42729E7542384BBE
was not expected. Use the XmlInclude or SoapInclude attribute to
specify types that are not known statically. at
Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.XmlSerializationWriter1.Write2_Job(String
n, String ns, Job o, Boolean isNullable, Boolean needType) at
Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.XmlSerializationWriter1.Write9_GetJobByNumberResponse(Object[]
p) at
Microsoft.Xml.Serialization.GeneratedAssembly.ArrayOfObjectSerializer13.Serialize(Object
objectToSerialize, XmlSerializationWriter writer) at
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer.Serialize(XmlWriter xmlWriter,
Object o, XmlSerializerNamespaces namespaces, String encodingStyle,
String id) — End of inner exception stack trace — at
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer.Serialize(XmlWriter xmlWriter,
Object o, XmlSerializerNamespaces namespaces, String encodingStyle,
String id) at
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapServerProtocol.WriteReturns(Object[]
returnValues, Stream outputStream) at
System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebServiceHandler.WriteReturns(Object[]
returnValues) at
System.Web.Services.Protocols.WebServiceHandler.Invoke() — End of
inner exception stack trace —

ok i found a post that mentioned setting the ProxyCreationEnabled property to false; Ive done this and now it works fine. Whats the knock on effect of setting this property to false

Answer 1

You need to disable lazy loading and proxy creation on the EF context otherwise your POCO as the exception states is actually a DynamicProxy which cannot be serialised.

This article (archived here) will provide a little more info.