Service generation – under the hood

While services are being deployed when activating integration ports, there is more going on than meets the eye. A service generator written in X++ kicks in and creates the artifacts needed by the AOS to host the WCF services. These artifacts are files containing managed code (C#) and contain the service implementation, message contracts, and a WCF configuration. To explain this, we will take a closer look at one of the out-of-the-box integration ports: the DocumentHandling port.

Generated artifacts

When you take a look at the DocumentHandlingService service node in the AOT, you will find that this service has one method called Create. So when we deploy this service, we expect the following generated artifacts to be able to host the WCF service:

• A service contract which contains the service's interface
• An operation contract for the Create service operation
• Request and response message contracts for each operation used in the implementation of the...