Can we use [DataMember] instead of [ProtoMember] while use protobuf in WCF?

Question

I've already a service working using the DataContract attributes. We would like to switch to the protobuf implementation, but if we have to change all the attributes, it would be a lot of hardwork.

Is it possible to NOT use the ProtoMember and ProtoContract and have ProtoBuf using the DataMember and DataContract attributes?

thanks

Answer 1

Sure; protobuf-net is perfectly happy with [DataContract] / [DataMember] as long as it can still get valid numbers, which it does by looking for the Order property of DataMemberAttribute .

There is, however, a small problem... tools like svcutil don't guarantee the actual numbers - just the order. This can make it problematic to ensure that you have the same numbers of both sides. In addition, svcutil tends to start at zero , not one - and zero is not a valid field number for protobuf. If the numbers you get all turn out to be off-by-one, then you can tweak this by adding a partial class in a seperate file with a fixup, for example:

[ProtoContract(DataMemberOffset = 1)]
partial class Whatever { }

However, if the numbers are now all over the place (because they weren't sequential originally), they you might want to either use multiple [ProtoPartialMember(...)] attributes to tell it how to map each one (remembering that you can use nameof rather than hard-coding the member names):

[ProtoContract]
[ProtoPartialMember(1, nameof(SomeStringValue))]
[ProtoPartialMember(2, nameof(WhateverId))]
partial class Whatever { }

or just share the original type definition , which might be easier.