Wcf why use message contracts

SOAP Hear contain important information which are not directly related to message. SOAP body contains information which is used by the target. It describes how the programs will exchange message each other.

There are three way of communication between source and destination. Most of the time developer will concentrate more on developing the DataContract, Serializing the data, etc. The only advantage is by message contract we can decide which property will be pass as header property and which one will be pass on as body property.

What are the difference between message contract and data contract and when which one we should use? This is true. The only case when you need message contract is when you need full control over a structure of a SOAP message. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. You can find wcfTestClient. It will ask for the endpoint address , something like this.

Add a value for sBookID and click the Invoke button. The id of the book must be , since we have hardcoded the value in our Book. Once you have entered the correct value, the Response section will show details of the book with the id You can see the Header and Body of the actual message, which will be sent across the network.

Practically this article covers four major Contracts i. However, I have tried to explain each Contract separately with simple examples and codes. I am assuming you have checked all of them. WCF is vast and complex, and we need to dig and understand each method or attribute carefully.

I may have missed few things here and there. For the data that we want to send in the header, we add a MessageHeader attribute and for the data that we want to send in the body XML, we add a MessageBodyMember attribute. On the whole, we add the MessageContract attribute on these classes, so that these can be serialized for transfer. So our changed code becomes: So we are all set now. We just need to run the WCF test client and invoke the method again and we can see the results.

This is what we changed the code for. Other details are added to the response body XML. But using this process has some certain restrictions on it. These are: Any method involving MessageContract types can have only one input parameter and that too must be a MessageContract type. The return value can be either be void or any type that is of MessageContract type.