Share DTO objects between WCF services

Question

I feel this is a stupid question even before asking, but my brain isn't working too well right now. I have two WCF services "CountryService" and "FloristService".

Now CountryService has the following method:

IList<CountryDTO> GetAllCountries();

Additionally, FloristService has a method:

bool AddFlorist(FloristDTO florist);

All good so far, but the problem is that the FloristDTO references a CountryDTO i.e.

    public  string Address1 { get; set; }
    public  string Address2 { get; set; }
    public  string Address3 { get; set; }
    public  string City { get; set; }
    public  string Postcode { get; set; }
    public  CountryDTO Country { get; set; }
    public  string Name { get; set; }

This is fine, but if I use the service proxy generating util with Visual Stuidos (i.e. Add Reference > Add Service Reference) then I get two versions of CountryDTO are created i.e.FloristService.CountryDTO and CountryService.CountryDTO.

Now I can think of a few ways to overcome this, but nonw of them seem right. I wondered what the "correct" approach to this would be, is there anything funky I can do with the proxy generation tool to make it share common DTOs?

Cheers, Chris

Answer 1

You can reuse types in svcutil: http://blogs.msdn.com/youssefm/archive/2009/10/09/reusing-types-in-referenced-assemblies-with-svcutil-s-r-switch.aspx

Answer 2

Article "How to reuse types across service endpoints" suggests on client side manually update Reference.svcmap to include multiple and NamespaceMappings.

Alternatively svcutil does allow you to specify multiple endpoints at a single time and utilize /r(/reference) and /n(/namespace) parameters.