WCF: namespaces in WSDL

I’ve been working with WCF services a lot lately and I always specify namespaces for my service- and data-contracts. But I noticed that – by default – the WSDL of such a WCF service is generated in two parts:

a part that resides in the namespace "http://tempuri.org/",
a part that resides in the namespace I specified for the service.

The first WSDL contains an import of the second one. This also results in two separate .WSDL files when you download the meta-data (I leave any generated XML Schemas containing the data-contracts out of it in this post).

Although this works fine, I wondered whether or not it is possible to combine these WSDL files in to one file that uses the namespace I specified for my service, and get rid of this ugly "tempuri" namespace. And guess what, this is easy!

Here’s an example of a service I will use to demonstrate how to do this:


[ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:wcfsamples:mywcfservice")]  
public interface IMyWcfService  
{  
   [OperationContract]  
   string GetData(int value);  
}  
// implementation of the service  
public class MyWcfServiceImpl : IMyWcfService  
{  
   public string GetData(int value)  
   {  
      return string.Format("You entered: {0}", value);  
   }  
}

This must look familiar. Now, to make sure the WSDL that is generated for the service (once you created a host) consists of only one part that resides in the specified namespace, you must take the following steps:

Add a ServiceBehavior attribute to the implementation-class, and specify the service’s namespace.
Add the bindingNamespace attribute to all (non meta-data exchange) endpoints you configured for the service.

Example of step 1:


[ServiceBehavior(Namespace="urn:wcfsamples:mywcfservice")]

Example of step 2:

Finally, here’s a fragment of the WSDL that is generated for the service:

<xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<wsdl:definitions name="MyWcfServiceImpl" targetNamespace="urn:wcfsamples:mywcfservice" xmlns:wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/"
xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/soap/" xmlns:wsu="http:// …

That’s it. When you now download the meta-data for this service, you get only one .WSDL file. Exactly what I wanted.

I hope you find this information useful. And remember: let’s keep our WSDL tidy!

3 thoughts on “WCF: namespaces in WSDL”

Nice

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C00l.
But why isn’t this included in any MS-samples or courses? I think everyone would want this…

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Great example, I found a little more about how WSDL namespaces map to the various parts of the WCF service. I hope this helps to truely understand why microsoft made the namespace configurable in so many places

http://www.pluralsight.com/community/blogs/kirillg/archive/2006/06/18/28380.aspx

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3 thoughts on “WCF: namespaces in WSDL”

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