使用WCF WebService中的模型

Question

Not really sure if the title is correct, but I'll explain it further.

At the moment I have two web applications; one being an ASP.NET MVC 5 application and one being a WCF Service. The WCF Service is a service containing all the business logic and the data access layer. For accessing my database, I use Entity Framework 6.

I am trying to create a Controller for accessing some data in the database through the MVC application. It should have regular CRUD operations for testing purposes. The problem I ran into is that because my DAL is in the WCF Service, I continuously have to cast the retrieved data from the service to a model in my ASP.NET MVC application for it to be shown.

My question is; is it possible to use the EF-generated classes on my WCF Service to function as model in my ASP.NET MVC application?

For clarity, I added some codesamples;

WCF EF-generated object

public class WCFPerson
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

WCF Service

[WebMethod]
public List<WCFPerson> GetAllPersons()
{
    using (var db = new SomeDbcontext())
    {
        return db.WCFPersons.ToList();
    }
}

ASP.NET MVC Model

public class Person
{
    [Required]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    [Required, RegularExpression("([0-9]+)")] 
    public int Age { get; set; }
}

ASP.NET MVC Controller

public class PersonController : Controller
{
    private WCFService.WebServiceClient client = new WCFService.WebServiceClient();

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        var persons = client.GetAllPersons();
        var model = new List<Person>();

        //My problem:
        foreach (var person in persons)
        {
            model.Add(new Person() { Name = person.Name, Age = person.Age });
        }

        return View(model);
    }
}

I find this casting is very annoying. Imagine a scenario where the database changes, nuff said. Also, this example is small - my current Model has about 15 properties and it's very annoying to cast them all.

There is no chance I put the database connection directly in the MVC application. It has to be in the WCF Service for specific reasons. If it would be possible, I would've already done that .

Edit 1: Added DataAnnotations. This is actually quite important.

Answer 1

You should be able to use it directly as the model. There is no problem to do it so.

Another thing, to make the conversion you could also use Linq:

model=persons.Select(t=>new Person{
                          Name=t.Name,
                          Age=t.Age
                          });

This way is more compact.