WCF - Losing value of a property of an object while passing to Service Operation

Question

1.00/5 (2 votes)

See more:

VS2012/.NET 4.0, WCF Service, Passing an Object to Service

I am trying to call an Add service operation from client to create a Region. Somehow, the client code is not accepting the Region object and when debugging through code I see the RegionID is displayed as zero although I assigned a value in client before the call to Add operation.

Client Code:

C#

RegionServiceClient objClient = new RegionServiceClient("BasicHttpBinding_IRegionService");

    RegionServiceProxy.RegionData objRegion = new RegionServiceProxy.RegionData();
    objRegion.RegionID = 5;
    objRegion.RegionDescription = "New Region"
    int newID = objClient.Add(objRegion);

Service Operation Code:

C#

public int Add(RegionData objRegion)
{
    // objRegion.RegionID shows up as 0
    // objRegion.RegionDescription shows up as "New Region"
}

Question:
- Why am I losing the value for RegionID?
- Am I missing something?

Here is my Data Contract:

C#

[DataContract]
    public class RegionData
    {
        [DataMember]
        public int RegionID = 0;
        [DataMember]
        public string RegionDescription = string.Empty;
    }

Please help!

Posted 12-Dec-13 11:39am

Chirag B

Updated 10-Dec-20 1:29am

Add a Solution

Comments

Suvabrata Roy 12-Dec-13 23:42pm

I did not find anything wrong in your code.
to Find reason add another parameter ( DataMember ) with int type and Set some value to it let see what happen...

[no name] 13-Dec-13 13:02pm

I found some articles that suggest that "the add service refernece generate some properties with the suffix .IsSpecified, when I set it to true, then the value is sent, otherwise it isnt.".

Here is the article:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d5d446f3-8757-4a75-aac3-e55eaca3d28f/wcf-service-losing-values-of-properties?forum=wcf
and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733127.aspx

I did find RegionIdSpecified property in my service reference, but this is tedious if I have to set this for all int and other datatype properties, other than string.

I have also tried adding [Serialization] attribute to Data Contract class along side [DataContract] attribute and see that RegionIDSpecified property was gone and I am able to pass the object. But, all other operations of the service got disturbed and I have to pass some objects to it. i.e. GetList() method now asks for GetListRequest object as parameter to that operation.

I haven't got any easier/quick solution yet.

Member 10434230 13-Dec-13 6:55am

All seems to be fine with your code...
Can you follow the suggestion of "Suvabrata" and post the results

[no name] 13-Dec-13 14:18pm

Same result...When I added new field (NewRegionID) with [DataMember], I see two properties added in intelliscense - NewRegionID and NewRegionIDSpecified. When I debug the code into service method, NewRegionID value is showing up as 0, instead of 5.

3 solutions

Solution 1

I created a sample app as per code and all works fine, check below details:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IService1
{
[OperationContract]
int Add(RegionData objRegion);
}

[DataContract]
public class RegionData
{
[DataMember]
public int RegionID = 0;
[DataMember]
public string RegionDescription = string.Empty;
}

public class Service1 : IService1
{
public int Add(RegionData objRegion)
{
// objRegion.RegionID shows up as 0
// objRegion.RegionDescription shows up as "New Region"

return objRegion.RegionID;
}
}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
ServiceReference1.Service1Client cl = new ServiceReference1.Service1Client();
ServiceReference1.RegionData data = new ServiceReference1.RegionData();

data.RegionID = 20; // Set whatever int value you want
data.RegionDescription = "Testing descriptions";

int abc = cl.Add(data); //the output comes out to be above int value i.e. 20.
}

Review your code and find out what is going wrong.

Posted 13-Dec-13 1:11am

Member 10434230

Comments

[no name] 13-Dec-13 17:15pm

Thanks for your response and help! Yes, I have checked my code again and again.

FYI, I have tried creating WCF service library component as well as creating service host file .svc within IIS, and in both cases if I don't provide IsRequired to true then it shows as zero value inside service operation, regardless of the value i pass.

Solution 3

RegionServiceProxy.RegionData objRegion = new RegionServiceProxy.RegionData();
objRegion.RegionID = 5;
objRegion.RegionIDSpecified = true
objRegion.RegionDescription = "New Region"
int newID = objClient.Add(objRegion);

Posted 10-Dec-20 1:29am

Jigar Patel

Updated 10-Dec-20 1:50am

v2

Comments

Richard Deeming 10-Dec-20 8:54am

An unformatted, unexplained code dump, which references a property that doesn't exist in the OP's code, is not a "solution" to this already-solved question.

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Chirag B · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-13T09:38:00

Here is an update, based on following article:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2046206/how-to-prevent-specified-properties-being-generated-in-wcf-clients[^]

When I add following attribute instead of just [DataMember], I was able to see the value in my service operation - Add(objRegion) and data is being added into the database.

[DataMember(IsRequired=true)]

Still on research why we need IsRequired on all the fields of Data Contract to true, but if we don't add or set IsRequired to false, then you have Specified properties generated for all fields of Data Contract except string fields and the value shows up as zero in service method if you do not set Spefified properties to be true for those fields.

WCF - Losing value of a property of an object while passing to Service Operation

3 solutions

Solution 1

Solution 2

Solution 3

Add your solution here

Preview 0

Existing Members

...or Join us