Exposing Entities through WCF

I have a WCF that uses a ADO.NET Entity Data Model to access SQL Server.

To insert a new row in a table with seven columns I'm using a WCF method.

I think send seven parameters it's too much, so I can use a struct or table's entity object.

What do you think? Do you re开发者_JAVA技巧commend me to expose an entity object through WCF? Or I need to use a struct to avoid do that.

It depends on size / complexity of your application. Exposing entity is possible but it can cause some serialization problems when transporting whole object graph (entity with its relation). These problems are usually solved by marking entities with DataContract and DataMember attributes (used by default if you use EFv1 or default entity generation in EFv4 = no T4 templates).

The second approach you described is recommended if you want to follow clean architecture and good separation of concerns but it will make your application more complex (another layer of objects, conversions, etc.). Structures or classes created for data transportation are generally called DTOs (Data Transfer Objects).

Data Transfer Objects allow you transferring only necessary subset of data required for entity. If you for example have some infrastructural properties in the entity (like CreatedAt, CreatedBy) you will not want client to set these properties because it is responsibility of the service to set them. Because of that there is no need to allow client passing them. By not exposing these properties in the DTO you will make this clear.

My experience of using entities as Data Contracts is that you continually run into all kinds of hassle. Maintaining DTOs is not ideal, but gives you very fine grained control including the ability to change your DB schema without changing your contracts, and also control over the fields exposed by your service.

Automapper can really help you: http://automapper.codeplex.com/