(just moved this topic from another board, as it is apex related...)

I just stumbled upon a problem, when trying to expose a webservice which uses a derived class as a parameter. In that case, SF just exposes all variables of the child class itself, but no variables of the parent class as expected.

global  class WebServiceTestExtension {
	
	global virtual class Parent {
		WebService String parentVariable;	
	}
	global class Child extends Parent {
		WebService String childVariable;	
	}	
	
	webService  static String setParentAndChild(Child c){
		return c.parentVariable + c.childVariable;
	}
}


results in this wsdl (just an excerpt):

<xsd:complexType name="Child">
−
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name="childVariable" minOccurs="0" type="xsd:string" nillable="true"/>
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>
−
<xsd:element name="setParentAndChild">
−
<xsd:complexType>
−
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name="c" type="tns:Child" nillable="true"/>
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>
</xsd:element>

As you can see, any reference to Parent is missing.

Same happens in the other direction, when parsing a WSDL in SF which contains elements, which extend other elements. In this case, the extension is ignored, thus it is not possible to create a valid call to the external webservice. Even if this is a feature, which is not supported, I would expect an error message at least. Or am I missing something?

	<xs:complexType name="parent">
        <xs:sequence>
            <xs:element name="parentvariable" type="xs:string"/>
        </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>	
    <xs:complexType name="child">
        <xs:complexContent>
            <xs:extension base="tns:parent">
                <xs:sequence>
                    <xs:element name="childvariable" type="xs:dateTime"/>
                </xs:sequence>
            </xs:extension>
        </xs:complexContent>
    </xs:complexType>
	
In this case in the respective Child class, there will be no reference to the parent.