Question

Look at this complex type, which is basically a DTO that wraps some entities. I don’t need to track these entities or use the for updating or any of that stuff, I just want to send them down to the client. The stuff at the top are non-entities just to let me know that I’m not crazy.

public class ResultDetail
{
    // non entities (some are even complex) - this works GREAT!
    public string WTF { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<int> WTFs { get; set; }
    public SomethingElse StoneAge { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<SomethingElse> StoneAgers { get; set; }


    // these are entities - none of this works
    public EntityA EntityA { get; set; }
    public IEnumerable<EntityB> EntityB { get; set; }
}

public class SomethingElse
{
    public int ShoeString { get; set; }
}

Now look at this:

http://i.snag.gy/tI9O9.jpg

Not a single entity property shows up on the client side generated types. Are there attributes or something that I can or do I really need to create DTO objects for every one of these entity types? There are more than 2 as in my sample and they have many properties.

By the way these entity types have been generated on the client because of the normal query operations in the domain service that work with them.

Answer 1

This is not possible as current Ria services framework is mainly designed for tracking entities, and for Ria services it is not possible to detect which properties to serialized and which to note, since every entity has navigation properties, serializing properties may cause infinite loops or long loops as there is no control over how to navigate object graph.

Instead you are expected to program your client in such way so that you will load relations on demand correctly.