Jelle Druyts

Great article, I'm investigating how to customize the output of xsd.exe (which also supports Schema Importer Extensions), currently items in the schema that have a 1 to many relation get generated as arrays. I would like to make use of System.Collections.Generic namespace and substiture these arrays for generic collections, say for example a List of T 'Customer'. I've been checking out alternatives to xsd.exe and even some tools that grab the output from xsd.exe and manipulate it. Then I discovered your article and Schema Importer Extensions…. I'm not fully sure I can do it with Schema Importer Extensions but It appears that I could. Again thanks for your work, it's a great overview of this technology, there’s not much out there at the moment…

Good article, thank you,

But there is an other way for generating the proxy, take a look at the console application in the microsoft sample :

http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_fxsamples/html/3f5eb78f-0ef6-433a-b095-3a63b1ce0bc9.asp

It's for WinFx, but it work fine in .Net 2.0

No need to change machine.config or devenv.exe.config and no need to put the assembly in the GAC or in the Private assemblies directory

David

There is also a free product named xwsdl.exe to generate the proxy without the business object.

http://devolutions.net/products/xwsdl.aspx

thank you

Excellent article! I have not seen Schema Importer Extensions explained so well before.

As far as configuration goes, though, it would be really nice if there were some way to configure it more locally. I'm sure you've thought about this, but is there any sort of context available to the extension that would allow it to look for a configuration file that is local to, for example, the VS project in which the web reference is being generated?

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the feedback! I can definitely see the need for a "project-local" configuration, and I think I even considered building that but I'm not sure if it was impossible or if I just chose another approach altogether.

I think the only tricky part is finding the project context somewhere in the schema importer extension, meaning that your extension doesn't typically have access to the Visual Studio project it's being called from (since they can also be called from outside Visual Studio). I'm not sure but it might be possible to find out about the project location or other context information through one of the many parameters in the ImportSchemaType or equivalent methods.

Hope that helps,

Jelle

Great article, thanks. Do you know if there is a way to customize the actual web service proxy object, the SoapHttpClientProtocol implementation, and make the generated service class derive from a custom class (that would be an implementation of SoapHttpClientProtocol, of course)? We have a custom authentication method that consists of adding an additional soap header, and it would be great if we could override the invoke() method to do the adding of the soap header in our custom base class, and then make the code generator just extend our class instead of the SoapHttpClientProtocol class.

Thanks again.

Kendal.

You forgot the comma between the class name and assembly name, in the sample code, under the Deploying the Schema Importer Extension section.

>...we simply add the following lines to the <configuration> section of the machine.config file:

...
type="JelleDruyts.SchemaImporterExtensions.CustomerSchemaImporterExtension
JelleDruyts.SchemaImporterExtensions, Version=1.0.0.0,
Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=c88d0fcd698a2de7" />

I copy-and-paste the code into my app.config. Tooks me a few hours to figure why I couldn't break-point into my custom schema importer extension.

It is an excellent article nonetheless.

Thanks,
An

Kendal-

Unfortunately, no: it's not possible to change the actual web proxy class (or base class) using a Schema Importer Extension.

An-

Good catch! It must have slipped my watching eye :-(