ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Name

WebMethodAttribute

Synopsis

Use the WebMethodAttribute to mark all the methods that should be made available to web service clients. All methods marked with this attribute will be accessible automatically and will be included in the WSDL document (and the proxy class) that .NET generates. Methods that are not marked with this attribute will not visible or usable, even if they are public.

You can set various properties when you use this attribute. For example, the Description property contains a string of information about a web method and is used for automatically generated description documents and the Internet Explorer test page. CacheDuration specifies (in seconds) how long a response will be cached and reused for web method requests with identical parameter values. EnableSession allows you to configure whether session support is enabled for your web method. By default, a web service method will not be cached at all, and session support will not be enabled. The BufferResponse property is rarely used, as it only applies to HTTP requests. By default, BufferResponse is True, all as responses are serialized to memory and transferred only when complete.

The MessageName property is used to add an alias to a method. This property is most commonly used with polymorphic (overloaded) methods, which must be given unique names, or “disambiguated” before you can use them as web methods. When adding overloaded methods, the original method should retain its name for compatibility with ...