Question:
I’m trying to use Powershell to ping a couple of WCF Webservices from the command line. e.g.
I have an WCF Operation
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[OperationContract] string DoWork(string name); |
And I can call that with Powershell using.
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$proxy = New-WebServiceProxy -Uri 'http://localhost/TestService/Service.svc' $proxy.DoWork('Hello World') |
This works fine as long as the input params and return types are strings. However if I introduce integers, the generated method signatures & return types have additional paramSpecified properties generated.
Consider the following Method with a Data Contract return type.
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[DataContract] public class SimpleClass { [DataMember] public string Name { get; set; } [DataMember] public int Count { get; set; } } ... [OperationContract] SimpleClass DoWorkD(string name, int howMany); |
Problem 1
The signature of the method is wrong & has an extra parameter bool howManySpecified.
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$proxy = New-WebServiceProxy -Uri 'http://localhost/TestService/Service.svc' $method = $proxy | Get-Member -Name DoWorkD $method.Definition Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.NewWebserviceProxy.AutogeneratedTypes.WebServiceProxy3alhost_TestService_Service_svc.SimpleClass, -nv8lxgh, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null DoWorkD(string name, int howMany, bool howManySpecified) |
Problem 2
The returned proxy of the DataContract class also has additional XXXSpecified properties for non-string properties.
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______________________________________________________________________ PS D:\Work\Sandbox\Powershell> $proxy.DoWorkD("Hello World", 10, $true") Count CountSpecified Name ----- -------------- ---- 10 True Hello World |
Problem 3
Setting a primitive type as return type just has completely unintuitive behaviour. A simple method which returns an integer comes out as a System.Void method, whose results are available through ref parameters.
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[OperationContract] int DoWorkE(int a, int b, int c, int d); PS D:\Work\Sandbox\Powershell> $proxy.DoWorkE(1,$true, 2,$true,3,$true,4,$true, [ref] $intresult, [ref] $intresultPresent) $intresult 10 PS D:\Work\Sandbox\Powershell> ($proxy | Get-Member -Name DoWorkE).Definition System.Void DoWorkE(int a, bool aSpecified, int b, bool bSpecified, int c, bool cSpecified, int d, bool dSpecified, System.Int32& DoWorkEResult, System.Boolean& DoWorkEResultSpecified) |
Is this by design. I’m confused as to why these extra specified params are needed and if not, can they be removed and the int-results-by-ref is just bizarre
Thanks if anyone can shed any light on this design/behaviour.
Answer:
Read this question I asked a long time ago:
Strange behaviour calling method of wcf from powershell using new-webproxyservice
You need to add [XmlSerializerFormat] to the operation contract to avoid additional bool parameters.