How can I correctly serve WSDL of a WCF webservice located in a private LAN from behind a reverse proxy listening on public IP?
I have an Apache webserver configured in reverse proxy mode which listens for requests on a public IP address and serves them from the internal IIS host. WCF webservice generates WSDL using the FQDN address of the LAN host which, of course, cannot be read by an internet web service client.
Is there any setting that can be configured in wcf application's web.config or in IIS in order to customize the WSDL generated containing host address and put public address instead?
Best Answer
Add the following attribute to your service class:
This allows the service to be addressed by the client as
https://...
but the service can still be hosted onhttp://.....
See my answer on How to specify AddressFilterMode.Any declaratively for how to create an extension to allow
AddressFilterMode.Any
to be specified through configuration without requiring code attributes.In the
web.config
of the service host, the endpoint element must have an absolute URL in the address attribute that is the public URL that will be used by the client. In the same endpoint element, set thelistenUri
attribute to the absolute URL on which the service host is listening.The way I determine what the default absolute URI the host is listening on is to add a service reference in a client application which points the the physical server where the service is hosted. The web.config of the client will have an address for the service. I then copy that into the listenUri attribute in the hosts web.config.
In your service behavior configuration, add the element
serviceMetaData
with attributehttpGetEnabled=true
So you'll have something like this:
I am not sure if this works with message security or transport security. For this particular application, the credentials were passed as part of the DataContract so we had
basicHttpBinding
>security
>mode=none
. Since the transport is secure (to the ssl load balancer) there were no security issues.It is also possible in to leave the listenUri attribute blank, however it must be present.
Unfortunately, there is a bug in WCF where the the base address of imported schemas in the WSDL have the listenUri base address rather than the public base address (the one configured using the address attribute of the endpoint). To work around that issue, you need to create an IWsdlExportExtension implementation which brings the imported schemas into the WSDL document directly and removes the imports.
An example of this is provided in this article on Inline XSD in WSDL with WCF. Additionally you can have the example class inherit from
BehaviorExtensionElement
and complete the two new methods with:This will allow you to add an extension behavior in the .config file and add the behavior using configuration rather than having to create a service factory.
Under the
system.servicemodel
configuration element add:And then reference the new endpoint behavior in your endpoint configuration using the behaviorConfiguration attribute