Question

The situation:

We have a library project that houses much of our code for the various integrations we work on. Many of the integrations consume web service apis, and my supervisor doesn’t want 5 gazillion web service references added to the project.

What we generally do, then, is add a reference to a new project and copy the References.vb to the solution and just call the generated code. Not terribly convenient if changes are made to the service, but it works.

Recently, I ran into a problem where we have to use 3 web services for the same integration. 2 of these contain the same class definitions, however, they’re in different namespaces because they belong to different services. This became a problem for me because one of the services searches a user based on user ID, and the other pulls back blocks of users. Both return an object, or list of, that is exactly the same semantically. And I need to process the data the same, whether it came from one service or the other.

My solution, was to strip out the duplicated classes in the service and replace them with classes inherited from common base classes. This allowed me to work with both objects as if they were the same, however, it required modifying the generated web service proxy. Therefore this change will need to be made every time I need to regenerate the proxy.

I’m curious what you all might think a better solution to this would be.

Answer 1

wsdl.exe using the /sharetypes switch allows the same types to be used across multiple service definitions, provided the wire signatures are not correct. I was unable to use it in my situation, though, because the various wsdl contracts were carelessly namespaced.