Identical Types In Separate Web Services

Question

I have a similar problem as this question. I have multiple web services that I am consuming with WCF, which all share types. The services themselves are written in Java and I do not have access to them. The shared types have the same signatures, but svcutil.exe gives this error when running:

Error: There was a validation error on a schema generated during export:
    Source:
    Line: 8 Column: 3
   Validation Error: The complexType 'http://MyServer.MyService:CommonType' has already been declared.

With CommonType having the same signature in both web services being consumed. Here's how I'm calling svcutil:

svcutil.exe /o:GeneratedServices.cs /n:*,MyNamespace.Generated http://MyServer.MyService1?WSDL http://MyServer.MyService2?WSDL

I know that wsdl.exe has /mergeTypes flag, which works for these services, but there are some options on svcutil.exe that I'd really like to use. I did have someone demonstrate that it is possible to me, however the backend was also using .NET and WCF, and I've been unsuccessful with the Java backend I'm using.

Answer 1

First - are they exactly the same? In particular, the SOAP namespaces must match (in addition to everything else). If they don't, then they are different (incompatible) types; you will have to use 2 different references (in different C# namespaces to avoid conflicts), and shift data between the two types.

If the types are the same and it still doesn't work, then you can perhaps use the /r switch with svcutil to consume the types from an existing assembly. Try using it once to get the first types (just from 1 of the urls) - then compile that code into an assembly. Use svcutil against the second endpoint with the /r flag identifying the assembly you generated moments ago.

Note; a related topic is to write a partial class for one-or-more of the types - for example, to provide conversion methods/operators on the types themselves. This might make things simpler. For example, you could write an implicit (or explicit) static conversion operator between two similar types in different namespaces.