I've been experimenting lately with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and OPF3. I created two classes, one for OPF3 and one for my WCF service. It became increasingly tiresome to maintain both classes whenever the table was updated. I really wanted to clean up my code by removing any "convert-from-opf3-object-to-wcf-object" functions, so I decided to combine both of them!

This solution worked better than I thought it would. Now I have an object that can be loaded straight from an SQL query and returned from my WCF contract to the client Silverlight application. Really all it involved was adding a couple more attributes and viola! Here's an example of what the final class looked like.

[Persistent( Rights = PersistentRights.Load )]
[DataContract( Name = "DiveSite", Namespace = Information.DiveService.DataObjects )]
public class DiveSite : BaseServiceContract, ISelfContainingObject, IContainsFaultDetail
{
    [DataMember]
    [Field( "DIVESITEID" )]
    public int DiveSiteId { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    [Field( "DIVESITENAME" )]
    public string DiveSiteName { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    [Field( "PRIMARYDIVESITETYPEID" )]
    public int? PrimaryDiveSiteTypeId { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    [Field( "MARKERTYPEID" )]
    public int MarkerTypeId { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    [Field( "ISBOOKMARKED" )]
    public bool IsBookmarked { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    [Field( "LATITUDE" )]
    public decimal Latitude { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    [Field( "LONGITUDE" )]
    public decimal Longitude { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public DiveSiteDetail DiveSiteDetail { get; set; }

    public FaultDetail FaultDetail { get; set; }

    public ObjectInfo ObjectInfo { get; set; }

    public static List<DiveSite> GetDiveSites( Location northWest, Location southWest )
    {
        return ObjectContextFactory.ObjectContext.GetObjectSet<DiveSite>( new SqlQuery( "EXEC spGetPublicDiveSites " ) ).ToList();
    }
}

With the addition of the DataContact and DataMember attributes I now could have one class that could be loaded with OPF3 and then sent to the client. Really helped with cleaning up any "conversion" functions.