Converting Business Object to Data Transfer Object

[Saiyed Alam]

Hello... I'm new to WCF. I'm working on a architecture where I need to convert my Business object class to Data Transfer Object class for accessing web service. At the same time I need to do the opposite. but I don't know how to this conversion? Any help would be appreciated, specially with code sample. Thanking in Advance Johnny

[Christian Graus]

I'd be astounded if half the point of WCF was not that it offers this type of serialisation for you. Even web services, which WCF will wrap, I believe, will do that for you.

Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

[Saiyed Alam]

Thanks for your quick response. Actually i have to transfer the business object from my Desktop app to a remote WCF service .That's why i think i have to convert my business object to DTO and vice versa. How can i do this?

[Christian Graus]

I don't know for sure, I just know that if you need to do any sort of conversion, then WCF only makes it harder to use a webservice, because I've written plenty of webservice clients and webservices, without ever having to do this. Also, please don't cross post.

Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.

[Tobias82]

Hello Johnny, converting a BO to a DTO is a manual task which has to be done by yourself and not by WCF. But there is a sweet library called AutoMapper (http://automapper.codeplex.com/[^]) I can highly recommend. Its a convention-based object-object mapper which can handle the BO-to-DTO mapping and vice versa for you. Take a look and enjoy :-) Greetings, Tobias