WCF Data Contract and Reference Entity Data?

Question

Soliciting feedback/options/comments regarding a \"best\" pattern to use for reference data in my services.

What do I mean by reference data?

Let\'s use Northwin

Answer 1

I've decided against the approach I was going to take. I think much of my initial concerns were a result of a lack of requirements. I sort of expected this to be the case, but was curious to see how others might have tackled this issue of determining when to load up certain data and when not to.

I am flattening my Data Contract to contain the most used fields of reference data elements. This should work for a majority of consumers. If the supplied data is not enough for a given consumer, they'll have the option to query a separate service to pull back the full details for a particular reference entity (for example a Currency, State, etc). For simple lookups that really are basically Key/Value pairs, we'll be handling them with a generic Key/Value pair Data Contract. I might even use the KnownType attribute for my more specialized Key/Value pairs.

[DataContract]
public OrderDTO
{
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public CustomerDTO Customer;

    //in this case, I think consumers will need currency data, 
    //so I pass back a full currency item
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public Currency Currency; 

    //in this case, I think consumers are not likely to need full StateRegion data, 
    //so I pass back a "reference" to it
    //User's can call a separate service method to get full details if needed, or 
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public KeyValuePair ShipToStateRegion;

    //etc..
}


[DataContract]
[KnownType(Currency)]
public KeyValuePair
{
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public string Key;

    [DataMember(Required)]
    public string Value;

    //enum consisting of all possible reference types, 
    //such as "Currency", "StateRegion", "Country", etc.
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public ReferenceType ReferenceType; 
}


[DataContract]
public Currency : KeyValuePair
{
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public decimal ExchangeRate;

    [DataMember(Required)]
    public DateTime ExchangeRateAsOfDate;
}


[DataContract]
public CustomerDTO 
{
    [DataMember(Required)]
    public string CustomerID;

    [DataMember(Required)]
    public string Name;

    //etc....
}

Thoughts? Opinions? Comments?