What is the best way to download all of the WSDL f

Question

What is the best way to download all of the WSDL files exposed by a WCF service?

For example, the root WSDL file references the following other WSDL files:

<xsd:import schemaLocation="http://localhost:80/?xsd=xsd0" namespace="http://tempuri.com"/>
<xsd:import schemaLocation="http://localhost:80/?xsd=xsd1" namespace="http://tempuri.com"/>

Ideally it would be possible to automate the download so that every time the WSDL changes it would be easy to distribute the files to a customer or incorporate into a document/SDK.

Answer 1

If you own the service, another interesting option you could explore is using Christian Weyer's FlatWSDL behavior, which will force WCF to generate everything in a single WSDL document, which should make it a lot easier for you to distribute it.

Answer 2

It looks like Microsoft provide Disco.exe for doing this.

Answer 3

There is a simple code snippet that makes it possible downloading a WSDL and all the belonging XSD files for offline use (for example for code generation).

Update

The blog where the code snippet was shown is not available anymore. Luckily, Pablo Diez created a small project based on my blog post and uploaded it to github. It is available now here: https://github.com/pablod/xsd-downloader

Answer 4

Meanwhile, disco.exe is considered obsolete technology by Microsoft.

You can use svcutil.exe /t:metadata to achieve the same in the WCF age. Additional benefits are support for additional features, eg WS-Policy.

Save schema from URL:

svcutil /t:metadata http://host/pathtomy.svc?wsdl

Save schema from assembly, eg in automated build:

svcutil /t:metadata c:\wcfweb\pathToWcfServiceAssembly.dll