This seems like a fundamental Web Services problem. However an elegant solution is elusive based on some research I have been able to do. I guess I am missing something here
I am using a WCF client to connect to a External web service of which I have no control. The external WS is java based. There are a bunch of assemblies which are provided to call the methods in web service. These assemblies have base classes and derived classes. The web service methods can take Base class as param whereas from the WCF Client I instantiate a Derived class and pass it to the method.
To simulate this scenario, I created a small project with one ClassLibrary which has a BaseClass and a DerivedClass with one method.
Then I create an asmx web service and add a HelloWorld method inside it. I add a reference to the ClassLibrary. This method takes a BaseClass type param.
Then I create a Service Reference to the ASMX web service. In the proxy class, I add a XmlSerializerFormatAttribute to the method if it is already not there.
From the WCF client, I call the ASMX web method
BaseClass bc = new Derived();
ServiceReference1.TestService ts = new WCFTest.ServiceReference1.TestService();
lbl1.Text = (c1.HelloWorld(bc));
The call fails with error
The type ClassLib.Derived was not expected. Use the XmlInclude or SoapInclude attribute to specify types that are not known statically.
The only way I could call this web service method was by adding XmlInclude attribute to the BaseClass in the ClassLibrary.
In my scenario, this library is a dll provided by an external vendor. I cannot add attributes to its classes. I have looked a DataContractSerializer and KnownTypes and XmlSerializer ctor. However those solutions do not seem to be applicable in my scenario.
How can I make XMLSerializer see the Derived classes in the assemblies I have referencing in the WCF Client? Is there an elegant solution?
Thanks,
Hem
Including your own type mapping for an XmlSerializerOperationBehavior may just work, but I haven't tried this (see GetXmlMappings).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel.description.xmlserializeroperationbehavior.aspx
Alternatively, forcing use of the DataContractSerializer via a DataContractSerializerOperationBehavior (as opposed to the XmlSerializerOperationBehavior it's using now) may work too, if you specify your own known types
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms576751%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Finally, as a last resort, you can force use of the DataContractSerializer using the DataContractSerializerOperationBehavior, then specify your own DataContractSurrogate to force use of the XmlSerializer where you can pass custom types to its constructor (which circumvents the requirement for the XmlInclude attribute).
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms751540.aspx
Hope that helps.
Related
I'm a relatively new user of both Autofac and ASP.NET Core. I've recently ported a small project from a 'classic' ASP.NET WebAPI project to ASP.NET Core. I am having trouble with Autofac, specifically in registration of generic types.
This project uses a Command pattern, each command handler is a closed generic like
public class UpdateCustomerCommandHandler: ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>
These command handlers are injected into the controllers like:
readonly private ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand> _updateCustomerCommand;
public ValuesController(ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand> updateCustomerCommand)
{
_updateCustomerCommand = updateCustomerCommand;
}
Autofac is configured (partially) as:
var builder = new ContainerBuilder();
var assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();
//This doesn't seem to be working as expected.
builder.RegisterAssemblyTypes(assemblies)
.As(t => t.GetInterfaces()
.Where(a => a.IsClosedTypeOf(typeof(ICommandHandler<>)))
.Select(a => new KeyedService("commandHandler", a)));
The above does not seem to be registering the generic as expected. If I use the below method for registration, it works well.
builder.RegisterType<UpdateCustomerCommandHandler>().As<ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>>();
When I say "It doesn't work", what I mean is that when attempting to instantiate the controller, I get "InvalidOperationException: Unable to resolve service for type 'BusinessLogic.ICommandHandler`1[BusinessLogic.UpdateCustomerCommand]' while attempting to activate 'AutoFac_Test.Controllers.ValuesController'."
This worked well in the Full WebAPI version of this project, but not after recreating it in ASP.NET Core. To be clear, this was working perfectly well before porting to ASP.NET Core.
Here is a link to the code that I've used to recreate this issue:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/185950/AutoFac_Test.zip
**** EDIT AFTER SOLUTION DISCOVERED ****
There was nothing in fact wrong with my Autofac configuration and certainly not Autofac itself. What had happened was that I had renamed the output of my dependent assemblies in an effort to make the assembly scanning stuff (replacing of AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies() more elegant, however I never modified the dependencies of the API project to reference the new assemblies. So Autofac was scanning the correctly loaded assemblies which happened to be the older versions, which did not contain the interfaces and implementations I expected...
Autofac has built-in support to register closed types of open-generic.
builder
.RegisterAssemblyTypes(ThisAssembly)
.AsClosedTypesOf(typeof(ICommandHandler<>));
This will scan your assembly, find types that close the open generic ICommandHandler<> interface, and register each of them against the closed generic interface they implement - in your case, ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>.
What doesn't work in your example is that you associate a key to your services. Autofac doesn't look for the keyed version of your ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand> when trying to instantiate the ValuesController, which is why you get the exception.
Edit after QuietSeditionist's comment:
I'll try to elaborate a bit on the keyed vs. default services. The way you registered your handlers is by associating the commandHandler key to them.
This means that once the container is built, here's the only way you can resolve such a handler:
// container will look for a registration for ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand> associated with the "commandHandler" key
container.ResolveKeyed<ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>>("commandHandler");
When instantiating ValuesController, Autofac doesn't look for a keyed registration of ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>, because it wasn't asked to.
The equivalent code it's executing is - and you can try to run that code yourself to get the exception:
// BOOM!
container.Resolve<ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>>();
The reason your second registration works is because you didn't key the service:
// No key
builder
.RegisterType<UpdateCustomerCommandHandler>()
.As<ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>>();
// commandHandler key
builder
.RegisterType<UpdateCustomerCommandHandler>()
.Keyed<ICommandHandler<UpdateCustomerCommand>>("commandHandler");
But since you don't want to register all your handlers one by one, here's how to register them without keying them:
builder
.RegisterAssemblyTypes(ThisAssembly)
.AsClosedTypesOf(typeof(ICommandHandler<>));
/Edit
I can see two scenarios where keying services can be useful:
You have several types implementing the same interface and you want to inject different implementations in different services. Let's say, you register both SqlConnection and DB2Connection as IDbConnection. You then have 2 services, one which is supposed to target SQL Server, the other one DB2. If they both depend on IDbConnection, you want to make sure you inject the correct one in each service.
If you use decorators, the way registrations work is you define the services to which the decorators will apply by a key - the first example is self-explanatory
Because Google brings you to this page even when you're trying to manually register types, I thought that even though this doesn't answer the asked question, it would be useful for future visitors. So, if you want to manually register a generic type, you would use this format:
service.AddTransient(typeof(IThing<>), typeof(GenericThing<>));
or if there's no interface, then just:
service.AddTransient(typeof(GenericThing<>));
and for completeness, if you have a generic with multiple types:
services.AddTransient(typeof(GenericThing<,>));
In an application I have the following components (among others):
MyDbContext : Entity framework data access
DBResourceProviderFactory : A custom ResourceProviderFactory providing a custom IResourceProvider (called DBResourceProvider...)
Other services
StructureMap
The custom resource provider is looking resources up in the db using MyDbContext, injected similarly as described in this SO answer.
The MyDbContext is also used in various other services, and since it is a web application, I use StructureMaps HttpContextScoped method to limit the lifetime of MyDbContext to the lifetime of the request (see an other SO question and its answer on this subject):
x.For<MyDbContext>().HttpContextScoped();
However, it seems that the lifetime of an IResourceProvider is not limited to a single http request. Therefore, DBResourceProvider keeps hanging onto a MyDbContext reference which will be disposed after the first request.
How can I handle this lifetime mismatch - have StructureMap return a transient MyDbContext for IDbResourceProvider while returning HttpContext-scoped instances to all other services?
Do I need two different implementations to do that? A marker interface?
Or is it a bad idea to use Entity Framework to look up localized resources in the first place (performance etc.)?
If you have a service that has (or needs to have) a long lifetime than (one of) its dependencies, the general solution is to use a factory to get those dependencies.
In your situation the solution might be simple. When your DBResourceProvider is defined in your composition root of your MVC application, it would simply succeed to use the DependencyResolver.Current.GetService method to get the MyDbContext.
When the DBResourceProvider service isn't part of the composition root (for instance because it contains business logic that you need to test), you could either extract that logic into its own class, to allow the service to be in the composition root, or you can inject a (singleton) factory (for instance IDbContextFactory or Func<MyDbContext>) that allows you to get the proper instance to be resolved.
I'm using Ninject 2.2.1.4 and Ninject.Extensions.Wcf 2.2.0.4.
My service is decorated with the following attribute:
[ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single)]
Using the above attribute, I receive the error:
"The service type provided could not be loaded as a service because it does not have a default (parameter-less) constructor. To fix the problem, add a default constructor to the type, or pass an instance of the type to the host."
If I remove the attribute Ninject works as expected.
After doing some research it's my understanding that since the service is marked as a singleton it will automatically be created with a parameter-less constructor by the ServiceHost, hence the error message. In order to resolve the issue, I have to create the service object myself, resolved using ninject, and then pass that singleton object off to the ServiceHost to use. I'm not sure how to do that.
I looked at the WCF extension source and I see that NinjectServiceHost inherits from ServiceHost, so my thought was to bind NinjectServiceHost to my instance of the service object using the overloaded constructor:
public NinjectServiceHost( object singletonInstance )
: base( singletonInstance )
{
}
I'm not sure if that's correct and if it is, how and where to properly bind it so the ServiceHost can be fed my instance.
Any suggestions? Thanks.
If you can live with a beta Version I suggest to update to 2.3.x It supports IIS hosted singleton Services. See also the examples on github
This is pretty much a duplicate question but instead of using Castle Dynamic Proxy I'm using LinFu Getting underlying type of a proxy object
I'm using automapper to create proxies of interfaces that I'm sending to my viewmodel in Asp.net MVC. My problem is from what I can tell that MVC's default MetadataProvider find the properties and metadata by calling .GetType() on the model.
So what happens is EditorFor() and DisplayFor() templates don't generate any fields. What I need to do is find the proxy target type and then generate my templates. I know I can just parse the name and use GetType( "thename" ) but was wondering if there was an easy way.
LinFu.DynamicProxy doesn't directly expose the underlying object of a proxy. It simply redirects each method call to an IInterceptor implementation instance. In order to access the underlying object, you'll have to figure out whether or not the current interceptor instance actually has a target class instance, or not.
If you're working with AutoMapper, AFAIK, they use LinFu.DynamicObject to do a lot of the duck taping, and calling GetType() on a dynamic type generated by LinFu.DynamicObject won't even get you the actual type in your domain model--it will just get you an object that has been literally duck-taped together by LinFu itself.
get latest AutoMapper - it uses Castle Dynamic Proxy, and you already know how to get this from there :)
Greetings,
Trying to sort through the best way to provide access to my Entity Manager while keeping the context open through the request to permit late loading. I am seeing a lot of examples like the following:
public class SomeController
{
MyEntities entities = new MyEntities();
}
The problem I see with this setup is that if you have a layer of business classes that you want to make calls into, you end up having to pass the manager as a parameter to these methods, like so:
public static GetEntity(MyEntities entityManager, int id)
{
return entityManager.Series.FirstOrDefault(s => s.SeriesId == id);
}
Obviously I am looking for a good, thread safe way, to provide the entityManager to the method without passing it. The way also needs to be unit testable, my previous attempts with putting it in Session did not work for unit tests.
I am actually looking for the recommended way of dealing with the Entity Framework in ASP .NET MVC for an enterprise level application.
Thanks in advance
Entity Framework v1.0 excels in Windows Forms applications where you can use the object context for as long as you like. In asp.net and mvc in particular it's a bit harder. My solution to this was to make the repositories or entity managers more like services that MVC could communicate with. I created a sort of generic all purpose base repository I could use whenever I felt like it and just stopped bothering too much about doing it right. I would try to avoid leaving the object context open for even a ms longer than is absolutely needed in a web application.
Have a look at EF4. I started using EF in production environment when that was in beta 0.75 or something similar and had no real issues with it except for it being "hard work" sometimes.
You might want to look at the Repository pattern (here's a write up of Repository with Linq to SQL).
The basic idea would be that instead of creating a static class, you instantiate a version of the Repository. You can pass in your EntityManager as a parameter to the class in the constructor -- or better yet, a factory that can create your EntityManager for the class so that it can do unit of work instantiation of the manager.
For MVC I use a base controller class. In this class you could create your entity manager factory and make it a property of the class so deriving classes have access to it. Allow it to be injected from a constructor but created with the proper default if the instance passed in is null. Whenever a controller method needs to create a repository, it can use this instance to pass into the Repository so that it can create the manager required.
In this way, you get rid of the static methods and allow mock instances to be used in your unit tests. By passing in a factory -- which ought to create instances that implement interfaces, btw -- you decouple your repository from the actual manager class.
Don't lazy load entities in the view. Don't make business layer calls in the view. Load all the entities the view will need up front in the controller, compute all the sums and averages the view will need up front in the controller, etc. After all, that's what the controller is for.