Return already serialzed type in WCF

Question

I'd like to use WCF to set up a cross-plattform WebService. A problem - actually more a performance issue - is that I'd like to return a Type (let's say Event) and I have this event already in XML. So I'd like to avoid deserializing to Event and then WCF is serializing it back to XML. Any idea how to manage this? What I want to achieve is something like "WCF, this method returns an Event-object but I've already serilized it to XML so take it and don't force me to deserialize it first so you can serialize it again".

Daniel

Answer 1

The WCF component that does message (de)serialization is the MessageFormatter.

Hence, you could provide a custom IDispatchMessageFormatter. In the SeralizeReply() method (which returns a Message) you could use the Message.CreateMessage() overload that takes an XmlReader and supply an XmlReader that you create from your XML. And that's it. A bit of work to do, though. You need to decide whether it's worth it.