WCF faults and exceptions

Question

I'm writing a WCF service for the first time. The service and all of its clients (at least for now) are written in C#. The service has to do a lot of input validation on the data it gets passed, so I need to have some way to indicate invalid data back to the client. I've been reading a lot about faults and exceptions, wrapping exceptions in faults, and a lot of conflicting articles that are just confusing me further. What is the proper way to handle this case?

Should I avoid exceptions altogether and package a Results return message? Should I create a special Fault, or a special Exception, or just throw ArgumentExceptions like I would for a non-WCF validation function?

The code I have right now (influenced by MSDN) is:

[DataContract]
public class ValidationFault
{
    [DataMember]
    public Dictionary<string, string> Errors { get; private set; }

    [DataMember]
    public bool Fatal { get; private set; }

    [DataMember]
    public Guid SeriesIdentifier { get; private set; }

    public ValidationFault(Guid id, string argument, string error, bool fatal)
    {
        SeriesIdentifier = id;
        Errors = new Dictionary<string, string> {{argument, error}};
        Fatal = fatal;
    }

    public void AddError(string argument, string error, bool fatal)
    {
        Errors.Add(argument, error);
        Fatal |= fatal;
    }
}

And on the method there's [FaultContract(typeof(ValidationFault))]. So is this the "right" way to approach this?

Answer 1

Throwing an exception is not useful from a WCF service Why not? Because it comes back as a bare fault and you need to

a) Set the fault to include exceptions

b) Parse the fault to get the text of the exception and see what happened.

So yes you need a fault rather than an exception. I would, in your case, create a custom fault which contains a list of the fields that failed the validation as part of the fault contract.

Note that WCF does fun things with dictionaries, which aren't ISerializable; it has special handling, so check the message coming back looks good over the wire; if not it's back to arrays for you.