Object design for WCF service

Question

I am writing a small WCF service to return an address based on GPS data. It's just a learning app for myself.

At the moment, my WCF exposes an object type called GpsData, which has a Lat and Long. It's decorated as a [DataContract] .

And then I have a method, getLocationByGpsData (GpsData);

On a project I recently worked on, they would have done it differently. They had an object called LocationByGpsDataRequest , which then contained a GpsData object. And it would return a ' LocationByGpsDataReply object, which had the GpsData object, as well as some extra address related data.

So:

LocationByGpsDataReply reply = getLocationByGpsData(new LocationByGpsDataRequest { Lat=...; long=...' };

Firstly, is their model better? Maybe it's more readable?

Secondly, I don't really want to expose the GpsData object by it's self. It's ALWAYS contained in a parent class.

var latitude = reply.GpsData.Latitude;

Is there a way to 'hide' GpsData is a stand alone object, so that when the client sees a list of ObjectTypes exposed by my WCF service, they only see the ones I intend them to use? Hope that makes sense...

Answer 1

Yes i agree that the their approach is better.

Also, the problem of hiding the attributes(lat, long) inside the GPSdata object can be achieved by using [Ignore Properties] tag.