It may seem pretty easy to pass DataSets (with DataTables within) around with .NET web services, but has anybody attempted to embed a DataTable (.NET FW 2.0 makes DataTable serializable on their own) in their custom complex type?
What I am getting at the client side is a proxy class that is the concatenation of <complex type name> + <table's property name in complex type> It has two public exposures: Any - array of XmlElements, and Any1 - a single XmlElement.
The client is .NET based, so how can it try to reconstruct back into a DataTable?
The melody of logic will always play out the truth. ~ Narumi Ayumu, Spiral
.NET 2.0 allows you to expose the DataTable as it is - pretty neat though. The serialization and deserialization were transparent. I didn't have to do anything.
As for me, I usually do not encourage DataTable to be embedded into an entity or complex type. If we are using Entities, we will use the generic list to expose the collection.
So there is no way to have the client side recognise and reconstruct a DataTable out of a custom container class?
Anyway that's indeed what I ended up doing - grouping up the entities into an ArrayList collection before sending out the wire.