WCF SmartDate override ToString

dob_xml posted on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

 Hi,

This might be a bit premature but here goes anyway....

I am passing a SmartDate in WCF

[DataContract]

public class RegulatedEntity

{

public void AddDate(SmartDate date)

{

if (_dates == null)

{

_dates = new List<SmartDate>();

}

_dates.Add(date);

}

private string _name;

[DataMember]

public string Name

{

get { return _name; }

set { _name = value; }

}

private List<SmartDate> _dates;

[DataMember]

public List<SmartDate> Dates

{

get { return _dates; }

set { _dates = value; }

}

}

On the client side I bind with

cmbCOBDate.DisplayMember = "Text";

cmbCOBDate.DataSource = regEnt.Dates;

Where regEnt is an instance of RegulatedEntity. It appears that SmartDate.ToString is not been overridden and I get WinFormsClient.RegGAEService.SmartDate in stead of the formated date.  _format is coming through fine.

 

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

RockfordLhotka replied on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

It is important to realize that on the client you do not have a SmartDate!!

WCF works just like web services: when you add a service reference, VS creates for you a whole set of types that have the same shape as the server types, but not the same behavior.

So no, ToString() is not overridden in the VS-generated proxy class being used by the client.

However, I think (am not sure) that those proxy classes are partial classes. So I think you can extend them, and so you could add a ToString() override in your partial class code.

But don't expect the client to have any of the other SmartDate behaviors either - date-to-text or text-to-date or empty value support or ...    On the client you just have a data transfer object (DTO) that looks like, but doesn't act like, a SmartDate.

dob_xml replied on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Thanks for that.

 

This leads me on to ask how does CSLA work with WCF when it only sends the data?

RockfordLhotka replied on Tuesday, June 26, 2007

The WCF data portal channel uses some deeper features of WCF (most notably the NetDataContractSerializer) that can clone objects just like the BinaryFormatter. But the default behavior is to act more like web services by using the DataContractSerializer.