Accessing Public classes in your Webservice from Clients

Recently I struggled a lot to figure out how to access classes that are public in my webservice namespace, from the client (that was making the webservice method calls)

I had a Public class called “Details” in my webservice and I had a method which would return an ArrayList of objects of type “Details” to the client. But I could never access the class “Details” from the client.

Here is what I finally did:

I had a webservice called TestWebService which had many public classes in its namespace. Here is how the namespace looked:

namespace Test.TestWebService

{

    public class Details

    {

        public Details() { }

        ...

    }

    public class TestWebService

    {

        ...

       [WebMethod]

 public ArrayList GetDetails()à Client couldn’t access the class “Details”

       public List<Details> GetDetails()à Client could access the class “Details”

       {   

            ArrayList list = new ArrayList(); 

            List<Details> details = new List<Details>();

            ///Do all processing

            ///Let us assume that this "list" gets filled up dynamically

            ...

            return list; à Client couldn’t access the class “Details”

            return details; à Client could access the class “Details”

      }

    }

}

So on the client side (after changing the return type) I tried to access the method this way:

test.TestWebService svc = new ConsoleApplication3.test.TestWebService();

test.Details[] details = svc.GetDetails(1);

So basically I could never access “Details” from my client until it got used somewhere in the web method signature (either as an input parameter or as a return value).

Hope this helps.

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