Why SvcUtil creates duplicate named classes when generating the proxy – Part 1
I appended ‘Part 1′ to this post when I started it because I know good and well that I’m not going to figure this out in one post.
On my current project, I need to communicate with a web service provided by a new partner company. I do not have access to the code behind this web service (and in a perfect world, I wouldn’t need to) and after my initial conversations with them, I got the feeling that they wouldn’t be very amenable to assisting me. So, here I am with a URL to their WSDL and SvcUtil which creates duplicate class names during proxy generation. I should say also that the web service times out when I call it but that is a seperate issue that I’m tracking down with this partner.
One duplicate class is a class named UploadDetails. When I added a service reference to my Visual Studio 2008 project, it generated duplicate class names in the Reference.cs file for all +20 data classes. The specifc class that I’m working with is called UploadDetails but I could work with any of their +20 classes to try and figure this out, I simply chose the UploadDetails class.
The duplicately named classes are all generated in the same namespace when I use the ‘Add Service Reference’ in Visual Studio. I’m not speaking of XML namespaces, I’m speaking of the C# namespaces. However when I generate the proxy by using SvcUtil from the command line, it creates one UploadDetails class in the global namespace and one UploadDetails class in the partner’s namespace (which I will refer to as the Bubba namespace) so there are no name collision problems. Since I have more control over the options in the SvcUtil command line, I am going to use it to figure this out.
Here are the class diagrams of the 2 UploadDetails classes. One class was generated in the default namespace and one class in the Bubba namespace:
- UploadDetails Class Diagrams
Therer are several things to note about the similarities and differences in these 2 classes:
- The Bubba.UploadDetails class implements IExtensibleDataObject and the other class does not.
- The Fields and Properties of the 2 classes are the same except for the ones used to implement IExtensibleDataObject.
- The Delete, Insert, and Update properties are of different data types in the 2 classes.
- The global namespace UploadDetails class properties are an object array.
- The Bubba.UploadDetails class properties are of types which inherit from List<object>. These types are classes named Delete, Insert, and Update and are shown at the bottom of the above image.
In my next post I’m going to see what the XML SOAP body looks like when I use each of these 2 UploadDetails classes. I think they’ll both serialize to the same XML but I want to see for myself.
