Chapter 30. The System.Web.Services.DescriptionNamespace
The System.Web.Services.Description
namespace
includes types used to represent the elements of Web Service
Description Language (WSDL), an XML grammar that describes web services
and specifies how to interact with them. Web services created with
ASP.NET automatically generate their own WSDL documents, which contain
all the information a client needs to interact with them and invoke
their methods. You can retrieve this document by requesting the
appropriate .asmx
file with ?WSDL appended to the end of the URL (as in
http://www.mysite.com/myservice.asmx?WSDL).
The starting point for understanding this namespace is the ServiceDescription
class, which represents the complete WSDL document and provides
collections of Binding
, Message
, Types
, and Service
objects. The ServiceDescription
class also provides Read()
and Write()
methods, which allow you to convert between actual
WSDL documents and their object representation. Finally, you can also use the ServiceDescriptionReflector
class to create a ServiceDescription
object based on an
existing web service by supplying the web service’s URL.
Another interesting class in this namespace is ServiceDescriptionImporter
,
which provides the functionality .NET uses to create proxy
classes based on WSDL documents. Most other classes represent a paticular portion
of a WSDL document, and you do not provide any additional functionality.
All details of WSDL implementation are “abstracted away” ...
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