Question

We have a very major existing REST based API using XML which grew over the past years and as you might realize, it became a little stubborn to work on the current codebase.
In order to drive some consolidation and implement best practices for future development, we currently consider to go forward with ServiceStack.

While we can exchange alot on the server side, we’d pretty much like to keep how we communicate with our clients. This means, we would like to have XSDs, which we can provide to our clients, based on which they can drive their implementations against our APIs.
Sofar we have been working XSD first => generate Code out of it.

As I saw on the metadata page of a sample ServiceStack project, it is possible to generate those XSDs out of the code, however I could not find any hints on how to influence this XSD generation. Things I’m most interested in would be a list of the following XSD features:

 <xs:documentation>
 <xs:maxLength>
 min/maxOccurs=""

I actually don’t want to present the whole validation chain which will be run against a given DTO server-side within the XSD, but we learned that having basic documentation and validation rules within the XSD makes life of us and our clients alot easier.

Thanks,
Philipp

Answer 1

ServiceStack uses .NET’s built-in XmlSchema and XsdDataContractExporter .NET classes to generate the XSD schema. This isn’t further customizable beyond the default implementation in ServiceStack.