Error adding service reference: Type is a recursive collection data contract which is not supported

Question

I tried to add a service reference to a WCF service that resides in the same solution from an ASP.NET MVC 4 project but failed. I got a error saying:

Answer 1

I had this error at compile time when trying to return a JObject as the endpoint result.

I got around it by making the endpoint return object and having this kind of code:

[WebGet(UriTemplate = "SomeRequest?form_request={form_request}", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
public object SomeRequest(string form_request)
{
    dynamic result = new JObject();
    // some other code
    result.status = "success";
    return JsonConvert.SerializeObject(result);
}

The jQuery consuming the service via jsonp e.g. $.getJSON('.svc/SomeRequest', 'form_request=' + webform_as_json, request_callback); then unpacks the serialized object like so:

function request_callback(response) {
    var json = $.parseJSON(response);
    if (json.status == 'success') {