Building Services Using the Service Factory: Modeling Edition

Retired Content

The Web Service Software Factory is now maintained by the community and can be found on the Service Factory site.

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Retired: November 2011

Building services with the Service Factory involves creating models of three kinds and performing both design and implementation activities. The Service Factory includes the following models:

  • Service Contract Model
  • Data Contract Model
  • Host Model

Each of these models is created with a graphical designer. To help you get started as quickly as possible, the Performing the Activities topic provides a list of the activities that can be performed using each model, and references the corresponding exercises described in the Building a Service Hands-on Lab. While the above topic will help you get started, it does not provide details about the activities or the caveats and limitations of the models and related factory capabilities. You can find this information in the following topics that are grouped in two stages:

Design Activities

Implementation Activities

You should review them before building production services.

Model Dependencies

In general, a model represents concepts (or elements) of a domain. The Service Factory models represent concepts in the Web service domain, and are used to provide input to generating the service implementation code. In order for the models to work, the necessary links must be in place. To be successful with the Service Factory you must understand what those links are and what they represent.

Figure 1 shows how the models relate to one another and their external dependencies.

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Figure 1
Service Factory Model dependencies

The relationships shown in Figure 1 are created at different times throughout the process of designing and implementing services. Most of the links within and between the models are created during the design stage.

Figure 1 also shows how the models are connected (or related) to the implementation artifacts. The Service Factory uses the project mapping table to relate the Service Contract Model and Data Contract Model elements to the Visual Studio solution projects that contain the corresponding code. The Host Model links the host and client elements directly to the Visual Studio solution projects.

To learn more about the project mapping table, see the Generating the Implementation topic and the Software Factory Architecture topic.