Is it possible to return objects from a WebService?

Question

Instead of returning a common string, is there a way to return classic objects? If not: what are the best practices? Do you transpose your object to xml and rebuild the object on the other side? What are the other possibilities?

Answer 1

As mentioned, you can do this in .net via serialization. By default all native types are serializable so this happens automagically for you.

However if you have complex types, you need to mark the object with the [Serializable] attribute. The same goes with complex types as properties.

So for example you need to have:

[Serializable]
public class MyClass
{
    public string MyString {get; set;}

    [Serializable]
    public MyOtherClass MyOtherClassProperty {get; set;}
}

Answer 2

If the object can be serialised to XML and can be described in WSDL then yes it is possible to return objects from a webservice.

Answer 3

Yes: in .NET they call this serialization, where objects are serialized into XML and then reconstructed by the consuming service back into its original object type or a surrogate with the same data structure.