Web service contains an empty service tag

Question

I created a WCF service.

In the WSDL I can't see the URL and PORT that the service should bind on.

All I see is:

<wsdl:service name="SimpleWebService"/>

Any idea what am I doing wrong? maybe something in the web.config?

<system.serviceModel>
    <client />
    <bindings>
        <webHttpBinding>
            <binding closeTimeout="00:10:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00" maxBufferSize="2147483647" maxBufferPoolSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647">
                <readerQuotas maxStringContentLength="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647" maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" />
            </binding>
        </webHttpBinding>
    </bindings>
    <services>
        <service name="WS.OS.SimpleWS" behaviorConfiguration="myServiceBehavior">
            <endpoint name="webHttpBinding" address="" binding="webHttpBinding" contract="WS.OS.SimpleWS" behaviorConfiguration="webHttp" />
            <endpoint name="mexHttpBinding" address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange" />
        </service>
    </services>
    <behaviors>
        <serviceBehaviors>
            <behavior name="myServiceBehavior">
                <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
                <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
            </behavior>
        </serviceBehaviors>
        <endpointBehaviors>
            <behavior name="webHttp">
                <webHttp />
            </behavior>
        </endpointBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
</system.serviceModel>

Can you provide any of your code? config file? other relevant source code? — Haris, Nov 16 '12 at 13:29
Is it hosted in IIS (which I'm guessing since you have the serviceHostingEnvironment tag in there)? — iMortalitySX, Nov 16 '12 at 14:26

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 17 '12 at 02:07

Creating an endpoint with webHttpBinding creates a REST endpoint. REST endpoints does not have wsdl. In your case you see wsdl generated because you have included the metadata behavior. You will have an endpoint listed in WSDL only for SOAP endpoints. This is a good blog post which helps you to understand this better : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlosfigueira/archive/2012/03/26/mixing-add-service-reference-and-wcf-web-http-a-k-a-rest-endpoint-does-not-work.aspx

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 16 '12 at 14:36

Looking at the question, and the config, I'm assuming (we all know where that leads) that your service is hosted in IIS. So given the address of "" and no port given, you will have to look in your IIS settings to find the site and the port on which the service is open. The defualt for http is 80 and https is 443.

So quick example, if your service is on the "Default Website" of the IIS then your service will probably be at:

http://YourServer/YourService/YourService.svc

If there is a web application that is hosted on there that is under a specificly different site, you will need to look into the setting of IIS to find it. It is common also to have IIS host the SVC as default page so you could have just the first two parts and not the actual page in your URI. I don't think you will have much luck unless you start digging into your web server.

Web service contains an empty service tag

2 Answers2