Why ASMX-Style WebReferences to WCF Services Don’t serialize Numbers

 

Based on a casual googling of this problem, it appears that some developers have spent days trying to figure out why an integer they set on the generated proxy field comes over the wire into the actual WCF service as ZERO.  I didn’t spend days figuring it out, but it certainly did cause no end of annoyance and cursing until I  did.

Let’s say you have a WCF service and for one reason or another (maybe your app is on a Handheld device and you cannot use “Add Service Reference”) you’ve set an ASMX – style “Add Web Reference”.  Your code in the generated proxy Reference.cs class may look like this:

 public int Quantity {
            get {
                return this.quantityField;
            }
            set {
                this.quantityField = value;
            }
        }
        /// <remarks/>
        [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnoreAttribute()]
        public bool QuantitySpecified {
            get {
                return this.quantityFieldSpecified;
            }
            set {
                this.quantityFieldSpecified = value;
            }
        }

Note the extra field XxxSpecified with the XmlIgnore attribute that gets generated. If you do not set the QuantitySpecified Boolean field to “true”, your Quantity isn’t going to make it over the wire, period.

The extra XxxSpecified properties are added when you use ASMX-style references  to a service that contains nullable value types, as ASMX does not directly support nullable types. The XxxSpecified must be true for ASMX to know that the value is specified in the XML, otherwise it will assume that the value is 'null'. So for example  if your datetime value contained MinDate, how would you know that this signals 'null' ? The same is true for reading property values; if the XxxSpecified is false, then the related value must be considered to be 'null'.  

The only exception to this is for strings.  The documentation for this may be there, but I sure could not find it.

Twitter Tip

Recently I saw somebody I follow on Twitter announcing they had started to follow everybody who follows them as an “experiment”. I’m not sure I would advise that – because it could bring the signal-to-noise ratio to an unacceptable level. When I get an email that somebody is now following me on twitter, I go check them out. I look at their list of followers. If I don’t recognize too many names of people I’m already following, I usually decline to follow them unless I can clearly see that their content is of interest to me.

I’ve made a Twitter policy of only following people I’m interested in – fellow MVP’s, gurus in various disciplines such as Silverlight or WCF, and so on. The result is that I get a lot of very relevant content and very little “noise” – except for the inevitable “fembot” spammers – but it seems that Twitter has been doing an excellent job of putting those out of commission lately.

I also follow a few luminaries like Jeff Attwood, even though a lot of his Tweets are not that relevant – because of his occasional “Twingers” that really make you think!