Code Generation And WCF Inheritance

Introduction

In this article I want to explain how I resolve a problem related to code generation for a WCF service.

Background

In my company we have a tool, implemented using DSL Tools, allowing us to generate code from a business model. By this tool we also generate all the WCF services for our architecture. We generate a base class were we put all generated code, and then we generate a partial class, inheriting from the base class, were we put the custom code or were we override some methods of the base class.

Using the code

First of all I started defining the interface of the WCF service. Since we have two classes (the generated one and the custom one) that represent a single WCF service, I define two different interfaces for each kind of class of the WCF service.

The following interfaces defines the contract for the WCF service. The ISampleGeneratedSrv is the interface for the generated class, the ISampleSrv is the interface for the custom class that inherits from the generated one.

/// <summary>
/// Interface for auto-generated service
/// </summary>
[ServiceContract]
public interface ISampleGeneratedSrv
{
    [OperationContract]
    string HelloWorldGenerated();
}
/// <summary>
/// Interface for custom service
/// </summary>
[ServiceContract]
public interface ISampleSrv : ISampleGeneratedSrv
{
    [OperationContract]
    string HelloWorldCustom();
}

The classes representing the WCF service are shown in the following code.

/// <summary>
/// Generated WCF service
/// </summary>
public class SampleGeneratedSrv:ISampleGeneratedSrv
{
    public string HelloWorldGenerated()
    {
        return "Hello from generated WCF Service";
    }
}

/// <summary>
/// WCF custom service that inherit from generated
/// </summary>
public partial class SampleSrv : SampleGeneratedSrv
{ }

/// <summary>
/// Partial of custom code of SampleSrv
/// </summary>
[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirements        Mode.Allowed)]
public partial class SampleSrv : ISampleSrv
{
    public string HelloWorldCustom()
    {
        return "Hello from custom WCF Service";
    }
}

The SampleGeneratedSrv is the base class where we put all the generated code implementing the ISampleGeneratedSrv which is also generated too.

The SampleSrv class inherits from the SampleGeneratedSrv and implements the ISampleSrv interface. In this class and in the related interface we put all the custom code that we can’t generate (some customizations that are not part of the original model for the generation). We can also override an existing method in the parent class.

In the Web.config file I set the contract for the SampleSrv as follow:

<service name="WCFInheritance.Web.WCFServices.SampleSrv">
        <endpoint address="" binding="customBinding" bindingConfiguration="DefaultContent" contract="WCFInheritance.Web.WCFServices.ISampleSrv" />
        <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
      </service>

Points of Interest

In this article we saw how implement inheritance in a WCF service. This can be useful when you have a tool that automatically generates the WCF services and you want to add new method or modify the logic of an existing generated one.

History

10 April 2014