Question

Silverlight - WCF - Business Layer Object, what to do about lost methods

Asked by: mSchmidt

Hi

Iam trying to do a small proof of concept application and trying to figure out how we should implement a Silverlight Application.
But i am having a bit of difficulties, i have a WCF Service which gives me a method which returns a List<Shift>.
However within my business object i have a helper method to calculate the ShiftLength and a couple of others. However once refering the service from my silverlight application these methods get lost, i could propably just add them as a partial class again within my silverlight app however that just seems stupid.
How would you go about adding such a method, or would you simply return the calculated value ?

The end page will show information like
ShiftEnd   ShiftStart     ShiftLength

What i am looking for is best practice or a guide/tutorial which spells out what to do.

public class Shift : IShift
    {
        public DateTime ShiftDate { get; set; }
        public DateTime ShiftEnd { get; set; }
        public DateTime ShiftStart { get; set; }
        private TimeSpan ShiftLength()
        {
            return ShiftEnd - ShiftStart;
        }
    }

                                  
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Asked On
2008-12-22 at 13:46:25ID24004325
Topics

WPF and Silverlight

,

Web Services and WCF

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: apeterPosted on 2008-12-23 at 06:38:25ID: 23233785

1. Make sure , they are public methods.
2. When ever u make chages in your Windows service, update your service reference in your client application.


Hope below link helps u in tutorial
http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2008/06/tutorial-creating-wcf-service-for.aspx

 

by: jarnsaterPosted on 2008-12-23 at 15:45:34ID: 23237749

What you are referring to is to having business logic in both the client and server code, which is normally not a good solution. Sure, a simple property calculation like the one mention above might me ok, but since you are talking about a proof of concept I assume the real business logic is going to be much more advanced. If so, keep try keeping the logic on the server side (accessing these methods as public wcf services instead)

For smaller stuff (again, like the example above) there might be times when you need it both on client and server side. If so, you can use partial classes (just like you suggested). You cannot reuse assemblies across silverlight/wcf since the frameworks differ.

During PDC this year, some MS guy talked about the future of silverlight, where he showed an example of a future toolkit that allows us to write stuff on the server side, which is automaticallty transformed to silverlight code. Pretty cool, but not available right now.

Then again, in a real life scenario, there are very few occasions where you need shared server/client code, so keeping the business logic on the server side should be enough in most cases.

 

by: mSchmidtPosted on 2008-12-24 at 01:28:18ID: 23239225

Yes thats what i meant.

The thing is the first application where i would like to use Silverlight is a shift management system, it will consists of 3 or 4 tables of data in the database however there will be a rich UI grid with drag and drop and alot of interaction.
Alot of the data will have a low rate of change and actually only be changed by the user currently using the application. ( No need to constantly pull data from the server )
So my idea was to load quite some data to the client and hold the Shift's in collection, the user should then interact with this local set of data, (ofcourse when changing data an async save to the server should be sent, this however would result in no delay for the user).

Do you think this is a bad idea or should i do this and then simply replicate the few calculation properties i have in the original business logic.

 

by: jarnsaterPosted on 2008-12-24 at 16:00:52ID: 23242316

If it is a multiuser application (which I assume) then holding a lot of state (or cache of data) on the client side is never a good idea, since you might get concurency problems and have unvalid cached data.

Then again, the benefit of silverlight apps (compared to standard asp.net) is that you _can_ hold state if you want to, giving us more choices. If your app happens to be a single user (or near that) then you could consider that, but I would normally not recommend it.

I think that holding state (even in winform apps etc) in the client is something that was standard a while back, when communicating with the server was slow and painful (modems and such). WIth todays solution of broadband everywhere, try designing your client app as stateless as possible, only keeping state in the database on the server.

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