Get metadata out of a webHttpBinding endpoint

Question

With a reference to my previous question, I would like to know how would I extract information of a WCF service from a client application to know what methods/types are exposed if the service exposes only one endpoint that uses webHttpBinding?

Just to summarize, in my previous question, I came to know that an endpoint using webHttpBinding does not get exposed in the generated WSDL because it would be a JSON endpoint and is just not compatible.

Answer 1

WebHttpBinding is a REST-based binding - REST does not expose metadata like WSDL/XSD contrary to SOAP.

There's no way to extract the metadata from a REST endpoint at this time. There are some efforts under way to establish a similar construct for REST called WADL (Web Application Description Language) - but that's nowhere near standardized yet.

For now, with REST endpoints, you have to either figure it out yourself, or you need to have some documentation provided by the service provider on e.g. a static HTML page or something.

.NET 4 does provide some level of an automatically generated help page - see this blog post or the MSDN docs for more info. But it's still nowhere near as formalized and machine-interpretable as WSDL/XSD.