For a long time I had an issue. I had a server .net project that had
multiple .asmx web services in it. In the server project, these
different services shared and returned various types: for example
Product. Just say we have Service1.asmx and Service2.asmx
When consuming these in another solution by adding a service reference
in VS2008, The problem was that Visual Studio was creating a name
space and types for each service, and not reusing them, so you'd end
up with the classes
MyNamespace.Service1.Product
MyNamespace.Service2.Product
and Soap clients like
MyNamespace.Service1.Service1SoapClient
MyNamespace.Service2.Service2SoapClient
Which was annoying, as you would have to be sure to create the correct
type of product object depending on what service you were about to
use. What I wanted was
SomeNamespace.API.Product
SomeNamespace.API.Service1SoapClient
SomeNamespace.API.Service2SoapClient
Turning to google, I found many suggestions to add a dll with the
orginal type to the project, and that the services would reuse this
type. They didn't. I found tip after tip referring to WCF, or
DataContact and various attributes, but that didn't work either.
I fould suggestions to use commands like :
svcutil /r:servertypes.dll /out:Service1.cs
http://localhost/Service1.asmx svcutil /r:servertypes.dll /out:Service2.cs
http://localhost/Service2.asmx which would reuse types. It didn't. I'm putting it down to not using
WCF on the server, but that's out of my hands.
But I figured it out. And the answer is fairly simple.
svcutil
http://localhost/Service1.asmx http://localhost/Service2.asmx /out:api.cs /namespace:*,SomeNamespace.API
Now, when the code is generated, you'll get a error that Product is
already defined, but it's more of a warning. But because the output is
combined, it works! Unlike calling it once for each service. Perhaps
I'll look at newer solutions for newer projects, but thankfully, the
annoyance is less for now.
