If you check out any of our previous WCF Tutorials, you'll notice all of the Service Contracts are implemented with interfaces containing only methods. For the longest time I thought that's all that was supported, until I thought about it a little more. In C# land, properties are simply wrappers around a get method and set method, so why wouldn't we be able to use properties in a service contract? Well the answer is we can.
Let's start by checking out the service contract we created for our interprocess communication tutorial.
public interface IStringReverser
{
[OperationContract]
string ReverseString(string value);
}
Let's add a property to this interface that retrieves the last string that was reversed.
public interface IStringReverser
{
string LastReversedString
{
get;
}
[OperationContract]
string ReverseString(string value);
}
Since the property doesn't have the OperationContract attribute, it won't be available through a WCF Service. You might initially think to just throw the attribute above the property, but doing so would result in this compile-time error:
That makes sense, since the property is not a method. What is a method, though, is the get portion of that property. This means, all we have to do is move the attribute to above the get keyword.
public interface IStringReverser
{
string LastReversedString
{
[OperationContract]
get;
}
[OperationContract]
string ReverseString(string value);
}
And there you have it, you now have a WCF service contract using properties. It's definitely better than having to implement separate get and set methods for each value.
08/11/2009 - 17:06
Thanks a lot dude. That small little trick worked out great.
You rock!
09/09/2009 - 15:28
thanks alot i's usefull:)
10/13/2009 - 02:00
very useful ,thanks
05/03/2010 - 11:34
good
06/30/2010 - 02:33
Thats great. This is a very useful article
Thanks
09/09/2010 - 01:41
Rokz
11/25/2010 - 05:42
thanks a lot :)
12/09/2010 - 16:02
Splendid.
12/20/2010 - 07:10
Is property set all applying the same rule?
01/13/2011 - 15:42
This is great for the get method. Can you show an example of how to set a property before calling a method in the service? Tried using a set but the value is blank in the service this.myProperty always is blank.
02/02/2011 - 05:03
Thanks
05/25/2011 - 09:45
Good to know! Thanks.
10/13/2011 - 08:15
Tks Man.Good one ..
12/23/2011 - 09:51
thx!