Consuming WCF Rest services with visual studio 2010?

Question

I am used to using soap services where you add a service reference and it creates strong types classes (return types) of each method..

Of course REST doesn't work like this

How do i consume a WCF REST Service?

Is there no way to use strongly typed classes for the return types?

I am using Visual Studio 2010 specifically

Any ideas or thoughts really appreciated

Thanks in advance

NO, not really - how would you create strongly typed classes, when there's really no machine readable service definition (like the WSDL/XSD with SOAP).... that's one of the big disadvantages in my opinion of REST - you just get back a blob of angle-bracket soup, and you have to hope there's some useful documentation describing that somewhere.... — marc_s, Aug 07 '10 at 17:23
@marc_s Actually services that purport to be RESTful and deliver a "blob of angle-bracket soup" have completely missed the point of REST's self-description constraint and the importance of precise media-types. — Darrel Miller, Aug 07 '10 at 20:15
Darrel, i have it working now.. using ReadAsDataContract on the response object.. — mark smith, Aug 07 '10 at 20:24

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

1

See Is there a WCF Rest C# Client Generation Tool?. If you own both the service and the client, you can reuse the contracts and instantiate an client channel with WebChannelFactory.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

Community

1
1

answered Aug 07 '10 at 17:26

larsw

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If you are going to use .net contracts and (de)serialize to .net types on both ends of the wire, why would you bother with the REST bindings? Wouldn't the wshttpbinding be a much better choice? – Darrel Miller Aug 07 '10 at 20:13
My whole point is to get away from SOAP ... I don't use half the stuff it provides so whats the point... I only wanted to be able to return my data into objects rather than going through XML and with the method ReadAsDataContract .. this is now sorted – mark smith Aug 07 '10 at 20:25
@mark Ok, so you are free to call me pedantic, but what you are trying to do is not REST. I'm not saying it is not a valid a approach, just be aware that when someone says "you can't do that it's not RESTful", you are free to ignore them :-) – Darrel Miller Aug 07 '10 at 20:37
Ok point taken. I of course wish to hear your comments. Thanks again. I will investigate further.. I understand the way i am doing things is probably not PURE REST but is supported and recommended via WCF (using REST)... that is why the method ReadAsDataContract exists... nothing special happening as far as i can see... Only that the methods takes the XMl from the REST Service and populates some .net classes... no magic really... Again thanks for your comments... much appreciated – mark smith Aug 07 '10 at 21:04

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 22 '14 at 02:58

        // It is used to call the webservice url
        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://careernet.localhost/rep-details/report_details/retrieves");
        request.Method = "POST";
        request.ContentType = "application/json";
        request.Accept = "application/json";

        try
        {
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

            Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();

           // Open the stream using a StreamReader for easy access.
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(responseStream);
            // Read the content.
            string responseFromServer = reader.ReadToEnd();
            // ...

I hope it will work for you.

Consuming WCF Rest services with visual studio 2010?

2 Answers2