Services as properties in WCF service

Question

I have a generic service for performing CRUD operations on a database and I would ideally like to expose it as a WCF service like this:

[ServiceContract]
public interface ICrudService<T> where T : class
{
    [OperationContract]
    T Add(T arg);

    // Read ...
    // Update ...
    // Delete ...
}

Unfortunately WCF doesn't support generics.

WCF Generic Class

WCF exposing generic type 'T'

So I'd like to make a WCF service that exposes other services as properties instead. Like this:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IService1
{
    [OperationContract]
    FooService FooService { get; }

    [OperationContract]
    BarService BarService { get; }
}

public interface ICrudService<T> where T : class
{
    T Add(T arg);

    // Read ...
    // Update ...
    // Delete ...
}

public class FooService : ICrudService<Foo>
{
}

public class BarService : ICrudService<Bar>
{
}    

It won't let me use the services as operation contracts. Is there some other way I could achieve this?

Answer 1

that's true:Unfortunately WCF doesn't support generics. but there is a way you can create Dictionary<string, object> as a input. I'm not sure that's what you want but i had a same problem and i could solve it this way.

[Serializable]
public class WebServiceInputGetDataParams : ISerializable
{
    public Dictionary<string, object> Entries
    {
        get { return entries; }
    }


    private Dictionary<string, object> entries;
    public WebServiceInputGetDataParams()
    {
        entries = new Dictionary<string, object>();
    }
    protected WebServiceInputGetDataParams(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
    {
        entries = new Dictionary<string, object>();
        foreach (var entry in info)
        {
            entries.Add(entry.Name, entry.Value);
        }
    }
    public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
    {
        foreach (var entry in entries)
        {
            info.AddValue(entry.Key, entry.Value);
        }
    }
}

its a input class. you can create a method like this:

public void TestMethod(WebServiceInputGetDataParams input)
{
    //access the input through dictiobnary
    input.Entries
}