Question

Looking for some guidance on a WCF service I’m prototyping.

I have a WCF service hosted in IIS that will pass data to my clients. I have a separate shared assembly that contains all my business objects that is referenced in my WCF project.

I want to have a few of the properties in these business objects read only as I don’t want my customers to be able to change these fields in their client code.

I read that decorating classes with the [DataContract] attribute enforces the proper serialization to maintain readonly fields but when I implement it the proxy classes generated in the client show as writable.

Are there any tricks to accomplish this?

Thanks!

/Eric

Answer 1

You can use regular properties, mark them with the DataMember attribute and make the set accessor private:

        [DataMember]
        public object IsFoo
        {
            get
            {
               return _isFoo;
            }
            private set { }
        }

EDIT: Also, to truly prevent users of your class from setting the property, you could always throw an InvalidOperation exception.