wsdl.exe/svcutil.exe - is there a way not to generate the classes for types in the xsds during a Web service or client generation

Question

We have a centrally managed object model for types in the schema in C#. We want every one across the enterprise use that object model instead of using the one generated each time from wsdl/svcutil during a webservice client or service implementation.

is there a parameter(any other way) to wsdl/svcutil not to generate classes for the schema types during theie execution?

Answer 1

I believe what you are looking for is: svcutil.exe /r your-dtos.dll

/reference: - Reference types in the specified assembly. When generating clients, use this option to specify assemblies that might contain types representing the metadata being imported. (Short: /r)

In my opinion the tight coupling of the WCF proxy, endpoint channel, service operations and dto payloads into the same generated client proxy is a major design flaw.

This is what spurred me to solve in my open web services framework where I decouple the end point and payload which allows:

• The same web service client (i.e. Soap11, Soap12, XML, JSON) to be able to call any web service.
• It lets me also use the same DataContract dto instance in any of the web service clients
• This has many benefits including being able to expose the same web service on a number of different end points without any extra configuration. Thus providing optimized web service endpoints for each consumer of my service. E.g.
  • XML for interoperability and strongly-type clients,
  • JSON for Ajax clients,
  • WSDL's for environments that prefer generated code (i.e. Flex Builder, VS.NET 'Add Service Reference' etc)

At my company we have developed hundreds of web services called by a number of different clients i.e. Ajax, Flash/ActionScript, C++, Silverlight, ASP.NET and being able to call the same web service through different endpoints has saved us countless hours.

Answer 2

I don't know of any specific setting or command line switch to enforce this - what you can do, but that's mostly a matter of training and enforcing by checking, is to share the class library (the assembly, in a DLL) with the developers, and make sure that everyone references that common class library and leaves the default settings in the "Add Service Reference" dialog (on the "Advanced" page) alone:

Here, you define that WCF will reuse any types it can find in any of the referenced assemblies - so if your developers add a regular reference to the common data contracts library, then WCF will use those types instead of re-creating them over and over again.

But again - that's only a "management by example and checking" kind of approach - I don't know of any technical way to enforce this.