Question

WCF Service accepts custom object as parameter, then blows out specific values before use

Asked by: azarc3

I have a custom object called Hours. This object is part of a class library that also contains the service and all other data contracts in the WCF Service. The service itself is hosted in a WCF Service Application (IIS). The Service funnels all calls to the class library for actual work. The binding for this Service is basicHttpBinding.

This setup works just fine for simply retrieving data from the service. It also works fine where I use primitive types as input parameters for a service method. However, when I try to use my custom object as an input parameter, and I debug it, I see that int32s and dates are reset to zero, but strings retain the values I set them to. As a result, operations that require non-default int and date values fail.

The crazy thing is that all other methods that simply return this custom object work just fine. Please help?

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Asked On
2009-11-06 at 09:24:20ID24878615
Tags

WCF

,

C#

,

Custom Object

Topics

Web Services and WCF

,

Microsoft Visual C#.Net

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: reza_radPosted on 2009-11-07 at 02:42:53ID: 25765748

Is the custom object Serializable ?

 

by: azarc3Posted on 2009-11-07 at 11:56:34ID: 25767779

Wasn't at first, but tried that also. All the property names changed unacceptably, so i stopped going down that route. i'll try it again on Monday just to make sure.

 

by: mas_oz2003Posted on 2009-11-07 at 15:06:18ID: 25768510

have you checked:
- Your custom class has the DataContract attribute.
- Your required members/properties has the DataMember attribute.

(See link the sample PurchaseOrder class : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733127.aspx)

Just in case, check that your client create the new object and set the properties before calling the wcf method.

if not solved. can you post your custom class and wcf method stubs (I do not need implementation just declarations)

 

by: azarc3Posted on 2009-11-12 at 14:55:02ID: 25809827

Been swamped this week.

I'll again try explicitly adding the ServiceContract/OperationContract() and DataContract/DataMember() decorators and report the outcome.

 

by: azarc3Posted on 2009-11-14 at 03:21:23ID: 25820217

None of your suggestions worked, though I'll award partial points for your efforts. The problem, it turns out, was with the proxy generation. Something has either gotten corrupted in my hosting application, or there's an unknown bug in svcutil.exe. The clue for me was that all these items worked perfectly for several weeks but then stopped working as soon as I changed the signature for a particular method.

For some strange reason, the method (generated by svcutil.exe) that creates and sets the values of the request object array was not setting the values of the int or DateTime properties in one particular custom type... but this behavior was not consistent with the other custom types. The "make up" of all the custom types are identical except in property names and number, so there was nothing special about the one that was acting retarded.

The quickest solution was to alter the critical method to accept individual property values and set the custom type values AFTER they arrived on the server, then continue processing as normal.

Thanks.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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