I've been thinking about how to design my WPF application, which receives data from a WCF duplex service, but I'm afraid of over engineering.
I thought about abstracting away the WCF communication completely from the WPF client by creating a "proxy client" library that implements the service and callback interfaces internally.
This way I don't have to create the callback class in the WPF application, but subscribe to events in the proxy client that are invoked when the callback methods in it are called by the service. This would allow me to also hide the service reference from WPF.
Then in WPF, all I will do is:
var client = new ApiClient(); //This is the client library
var stuff = client.GetStuff(); //Some service method
client.StuffDeleted += OnStuffDeleted; //Event that is invoked by library on callback
I would probably instantiate the client only once as a Singleton object for all ViewModels to call.
Then I thought I could take this further by creating "Model" classes that are almost identical to the WCF service reference generated classes (data contracts), adding another layer on top of the proxy client, and using automapper to create my models, then returning those to WPF instead of data contract classes.
I figured this way I would achieve complete separation from my WCF service, and having an extra layer would allow me to add metadata to my models before returning them, and then in the WPF side I will use these Models to construct the ViewModel which is meant for viewing/binding only.
Having such a client would also make it easier to centralize business logic, error handling, and make it simpler to do unit testing since the WCF client is a single independent component.
The problem is that I'm afraid of over engineering this. The database has EF entities, the WCF service has its own DTO classes, then I would have Models, and then ViewModels. I've also noticed that the generated classes from WCF implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface, which makes me think they were intended to be used as models (or to send an updates to the service?).
I'll try to summarize my main questions in bullet points:
- In M-V-VM, is it good practice to use the service reference genereated classes as Models?
- Is there much benefit in completely abstracting away WCF from WPF with a proxy client?
- Callback methods would invoke events that WPF is subscribed to
- Why do the generated service reference classes implement INotifyPropertyChanged?
Is this design overkill?
Thank you very much.
UPDATE:
Visualisation of what I'm trying to do:
As can be seen, the Proxy client in the middle has 2 layers (classes):
The first class is what WPF instantiates as a Singleton and uses to get back model classes.
The second class is a wrapper around the Service Reference client, and is called by the first layer. This is purely for data access purposes.
I have not added the callback methods which will be events that WPF subscribes to.