Make a single WCF service support both SOAP, REST and WSDL

I'm trying to build a C# service in .NET 3.5 that supports both SOAP - and shows the WSDL - and R开发者_StackOverflowEST.

The SOAP service and WSDL generation was easy enough to do using the ServiceHost and a BasicHttpBinding classes. Got that working and the client was happy.

Because the SOAP calls all used simple parameters, the client developers requested a REST interface for some of the commands. So I changed the ServiceHost class to a WebServiceHost, added necessary WebInvoke and WebGet attributes, added a WebHttpBinding class, and bingo - REST and SOAP were both working out of one service. Way cool, change one interface and both REST and SOAP got the new stuff.

But one problem - the WSDL no longer gets generated. I couldn't browse to http://server/service?wsdl and get the WSDL file. Checking the MSDN docs, that appears to be behavior for a default WebServiceHost.

Question: can I override this behavior so that the WSDL could be obtained? Doesn't have to the same URL as before - it can change - but I just need to have some URL into service to get the WSDL for those SOAP developers.

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When you say "added a WebHttpBinding class", it sounds like you are doing a lot of the configuration in code as opposed to in configuration files.

If this is the case, you could try moving the configuration to the configuration file. Then create 2 endpoints for the contract one REST and one SOAP, with 2 different addresses and bindings.

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But one problem - the WSDL no longer gets generated. I couldn't browse to http://server/service?wsdl and get the WSDL file. Checking the MSDN docs, that appears to be behavior for a default WebServiceHost.

Yes - that's one of the drawbacks of REST - no more WSDL, no more machine-readable service description. You need to hope the service provider gives you a usable and up to date documentation on what you can do.

There's no WSDL for REST - period. Can't be turned on or anything - it just doesn't exist.

There are some efforts under way to provide something similar - called WADL (Web Application Description Language), but as far as I know, it's still far from an established standard by any means. Also see: Do we need WADL?

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Circa, 2007, WSDL v2.0 is supposed to be able to describe RESTful services. I have found that with WCF in .Net v4.0, that the WDSL generated from a purely RESTful service is invalid (WSDL v1.0?).

I created a similar project that exposes both SOAP and RESTful endpoints, and enabled this by, as you did, modifying the interface as such:

    // Get all Categories - complex object response
    [OperationContract]                             // categories
    [WebGet(BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped, UriTemplate = "GetAllCategories")]
    CategoryCollection GetAllCategories();          // SubSonic object
    [OperationContract]                             // categories - respond with a JSON object
    [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped, UriTemplate = "GetAllCategories.JSON")]
    CategoryCollection GetAllCategoriesJSON();      // SubSonic object

One caveat to this is that all input parameters now must be of type string for all SOAP requests.

Any way of getting around this?