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In WCF, all services are exposed as contracts. Contract is a
platform-neutral and standard way of describing what the service does. Mainly
there are four types of contracts available in WCF. Service Contract, Data Contract,
Message Contract & Fault Contract.
Service Contract:
Service contracts describe the operation that service can provide. For Eg, a
Service provide to know the temperature of the city based on the zip code, this
service is called as Service contract. It will be created using Service and
Operational Contract attribute.
Data Contract:
Data contract describes the custom data type which is exposed to the client.
This defines the data types, that are passed to and from service. Data types
like int, string are identified by the client because it is already mention in
XML schema definition language document, but custom created class or data types
cannot be identified by the client e.g. Employee data type. By using
DataContract we can make client to be aware of Employee data type that are
returning or passing parameter to the method.
Message Contract
Default SOAP message format is provided by the WCF runtime for communication
between Client and service. If it is not meeting your requirements then we can
create our own message format. This can be achieved by using Message Contract
attribute.
Fault Contract
Suppose the service I consumed is not working in
the client application. I want to know the real cause of the problem. How I can
know the error? For this we are having Fault Contract. Fault Contract provides
documented view for error occurred in the service to client. This helps us to
easy identity, what error has occurred. |