WCF: Message Headers and XmlSerializerFormat

Sometimes you need to use the classic XmlSerializer due to interoperability or when doing schema first based on XSD contracts that contains e.g. XML attributes in complexTypes. I've used the [XmlSerializerFormat] switch on services many times without any problems, but recently I had to make use of a custom header - and that took me quite some time to get working.

This is the wire format of the header:

<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" >
<s:Header>
<h:CorrelationContext xmlns:h="urn:QueuedPubSub.CorrelationContext" xmlns="urn:QueuedPubSub.CorrelationContext" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" >
<CorrelationId>c4e03aae-9501-46e9-bbb8-a9ddf6c4fe15</CorrelationId>
<FaultAddress>feil</FaultAddress>
<Priority>0</Priority>
<ResponseAddress>svar</ResponseAddress>
</h:CorrelationContext>
. . .

The WCF OperationContext provides access to the message headers:

CorrelationContext context = OperationContext.Current. IncomingMessageHeaders.GetHeader<CorrelationContext> (Constants.CorrelationContextHeaderName, Constants.CorrelationContextNamespace);

I had used [XmlElement] attributes to control the name and namespace of the [Serializable] class members, only to get this error:

'EndElement' 'CorrelationContext' from namespace 'urn:QueuedPubSub.CorrelationContext' is not expected. Expecting element 'CorrelationId'.

That really puzzled me. To make a long story short, the MessageHeaders class and GetHeader<T> method only supports serializers derived from XmlObjectSerializer, such as the DataContractSerializer - but not XmlSerializer. To make this work, your header class must be implemented as a [DataContract] class even for [XmlSerializerFormat] services.

My working message header contracts looks like this:

[DataContract(Name = Constants.CorrelationContextHeaderName, Namespace = Constants.CorrelationContextNamespace)]
public class CorrelationContext
{
[DataMember]
public Guid CorrelationId { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string FaultAddress { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public int Priority { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string ResponseAddress { get; set; }
}


[MessageContract(IsWrapped = true)]
[Serializable]
public abstract class MessageWithCorrelationHeaderBase
{
[MessageHeader(MustUnderstand = true, Name = Constants.CorrelationContextHeaderName, Namespace = Constants.CorrelationContextNamespace)]
[XmlElement(ElementName = Constants.CorrelationContextHeaderName, Namespace = Constants.CorrelationContextNamespace)]
public CorrelationContext CorrelationContext { get; set; }
}

This code was made and tested on .NET 3.5 SP1.