Shawson's Code Blog » Web Services

WCF Services with both JSON and SOAP endpoints

shawson — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 13:14:26 +0000

A quick example of how to set this up in the web.config.

Services, in this example, can be accessed

using JSON via localhost/Services/MyService.svc/HelloWorld or..
using SOAP on localhost/Services/MyService.svc/soap/HelloWorld

Twitter OAuth Registration

shawson — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:17:08 +0000

Any app’s you create now which need to post to twitter programmatically, will need to do so using oAuth, for which you will need to register your app with twitter- this can be done @ http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new Once registered you will be taken to a page with your consumer keys (a key value and a secret value)- to get your access token, click the button on the right of that page (a token and a secret) and you should now have all 4 values you need to perform oAuth authentication prior to interacting with twitter.

Making your WCF Service compatible with legacy .net 1.1 applications

MSDeploy Setup Guide & How to Call Server Side Method Using jQuery/Ajax

shawson — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 08:09:05 +0000

Couple of interesting items popped up in the RRS feed’s this morning.

Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy – ScottGu’s Blog.

Calling Server Side Method Using jQuery/Ajax – Karan’s Blog.

Why ASMX web services are not an excuse anymore with WCF 4.0 – Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax)

shawson — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 19:43:16 +0000

Why ASMX web services are not an excuse anymore with WCF 4.0 – Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax). Related posts:WCF Services with both JSON and SOAP endpoints Making your WCF Service compatible with legacy .net 1.1 applications Web Services Debugging with Fiddler 2 Related posts:

Getting started with WCF and REST web services

shawson — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:03:07 +0000

I’m building some REST WCF services at the moment and found this great guide online www.robbagby.com/rest/rest-in-wcf-blog-series-index

The HiREST stuff shows you how to create fully fledged REST services utilising all of the HTTP verbs.

Heres a quick summary of the most useful bits;

The service itself is just added to the project as a normal WCF service. The following needs adding to the Web.config to setup the end

points;

Remember the class names in the web.config need to be fully qualified.

An example class for passing around the service;

[DataContract]
public class ProductData
{
    [DataMember]
    public int ProductId;

    [DataMember]
    public string ProductName;

    [DataMember]
    public string Description;

    [DataMember]
    public decimal Price;

    [DataMember]
    public string ProductImage;
}

The service itself is just a normal WCF service so consists of its usual two parts- the interface and the class. Here’s an example interface

demoing the various access methods and return serialisations;

    [ServiceContract]
    public interface IRESTServiceInterfaceName
    {
        // responds to a GET request to www.mysite.com/Servicename.svc/products/
        // return is serialised to JSON
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "products/", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
        List GetProducts();

        // responds to a GET request to www.mysite.com/Servicename.svc/products/{product_id}
        // return is serialised to JSON
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "products/{product_id}", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
        List GetProductById(string product_id);

        // responds to a GET request to www.mysite.com/Servicename.svc/products?brand={brand}
        // return is serialised to JSON
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(UriTemplate = "products?brand={brand}", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
        List GetProductsByBrand(string brand);

	// responds to a POST, but still passing a bunch of parameters into the querystring
	// no return type
        [WebInvoke(Method = "POST", UriTemplate = "product/{product_id}/rate?score={score}")]
        [OperationContract]
        void PostProductAppRating(string product_id, string score);

	// accepts a POST with a JSON encoded product data, to allow for an update
	// no return
	[WebInvoke(Method = "POST", UriTemplate = "product/{product_id}", RequestFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
	void PostProductUpdate(string product_id, ProductData data);

	//responds to a PUT- passing a querystring variable for the filename- it expects the body of the push request to be a file stream
	// no return type
        [WebInvoke(Method = "PUT", UriTemplate = "products/{product_id}/desktopimage?filename={file_name}")]
        [OperationContract]
        void PutProductImage(string product_id, string file_name, Stream fileContents);

    }

Note the variables in the curly braces must match the real parameters to the method signitures for the value to be automatically mapped.

Responses are generally done using HTTP response codes. At the top of each method you need to grab the current WebOperationContext which

will allow you to set the return codes;

    WebOperationContext ctx = WebOperationContext.Current;

    ctx.OutgoingResponse.StatusCode = System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK;		// .. if everything is ok!
    ctx.OutgoingResponse.StatusCode = System.Net.HttpStatusCode.BadRequest;	// on error
    ctx.OutgoingResponse.StatusCode = System.Net.HttpStatusCode.Created;	// after an insert

    // all of the http response codes are mapped here

    ctx.OutgoingResponse.SetStatusAsNotFound(); // if record cannot be found or similar

Properties getting “k__BackingField” appended to their name in the WSDL file

shawson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:58:08 +0000

I was finding k__backingField was being appended to all my object properties when exposed via my a WCF service, in the WSDL. The solution it turns out was simple- just had to make my class a [DataContract] and mark the properties as [DataMember].

via WCF Data Contracts and “k__BackingField” Property Naming – Nathan Bridgewater.

Making your WCF Service compatible with legacy .net 1.1 applications

shawson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:01:42 +0000

I’m building an error tracking service which all our future web project will report to, so we can track and tag all our various systems problems from one place- this is currently done with email which is a bit of a nightmare!

According to Microsoft, traditional ASMX web services are now considered “Legacy technology” (!) so I thought I would buite the bullet and build the new services using WCF.

This was fairly painless until I tried to consume the web service in some old .net 1.1 web apps- when trying to add the web reference I received this error message;

Web ReferenceslocalhostReference.map(1): Custom tool warning: DiscoCodeGenerator unable to initialize code generator. No code generated.

I found a great article over on the MSDN – and all it takes is a small change to the web.config, fiddling with, my old friend, the httpBindings.

I had to swap out the default bindings put in by .net;

For this one;

How to: Configure WCF Service to Interoperate with ASP.NET Web Service Clients.

The provided URI scheme ‘http’ is invalid; expected ‘https

shawson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:28:26 +0000

Going from dev to live, where the dev system referenced dev version of web services, but the live system has to reference live versions which are HTTPS i recieved this error;

The provided URI scheme ‘http’ is invalid; expected ‘https

This is resolved simply by updating the web.config file and setting the security tag’s mode attribute from None to Transport;

The provided URI scheme ‘http’ is invalid; expected ‘https.

Visually build XPath using “Sketch Path”

shawson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:59:44 +0000

Paul found an awesome tool fopr visually parsing XML files and building XPath statements, called Sketch Path available for download here Related posts:Consuming RSS Feeds using ASP.net controls Web Services Debugging with Fiddler 2 Making your WCF Service compatible with legacy .net 1.1 applications Related posts:

Quick XML serialisation of an object..

shawson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:16:03 +0000

Quick code snippet for taking a serialisable object, serialising to XMl then spitting out a string for you to write out to a debug log or something- i used this for spitting back the responses I was getting from a web service call i was making

            StringBuilder sb_xml = new StringBuilder();
            XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer( typeof( Hachette.Checkout.Vista.Stock.ProductStockLiteResultResponse ) );
            StringWriter w = new StringWriter(sb_xml);
            s.Serialize(w, ws_response);
            w.Close();
            Response.Write("");