Meta-Me

The ODataUriParser is continuing its march towards completion. In fact in ODataLib version 5.5 (the beta drops early next week) it is almost complete. In the last post I talked about how you could parse $filter and $orderby . In 5.5 you can also parse...

Next week we will release an official RC of the Microsoft ASP.NET WebAPI OData assembly. This marks the third release on our way to RTM.  Although this post talks about code that hasn’t been officially release yet, since all development is happening...

Background and Plans For a while now we’ve been shipping an early pre-release version of an ODataUriParser in ODataLib Contrib . The idea is to have code that converts a Uri used to interact with an OData Service into a Semantically bound Abstract Syntax...

Since my last set of blog posts on OData support in WebAPI (see parts 1 & 2 ) we’ve been busy adding support for Server Driven Paging, Inheritance and OData Actions. Our latest alpha release on Nuget has preview level support for these features. Lets...

The recent preview release of OData support in Web API is very exciting (see the new nuget package and codeplex project ). For the most part it is compatible with the previous [Queryable] support because it supports the same OData query options. That...

UPDATE 2 @1:21 pm on 16th August (PST): There is an updated version of the nuget package that resolves the previous dependency issues. Oh and my comments are now working again. UPDATE 1 @10:00 am on 16th August (PST): If you’ve tried using the...

I love the Actions feature in OData – which is hardly surprising given I was one of its designers.  Here’s the main reason why I love it: Actions allow you move from a CRUD architecture style, where you query and modify data using the same model...

In my last post I blithely said ' This is where judgment comes in... '. Unfortunately judgment isn't easy. Now when I was younger - say 10 years ago - I was sure about everything - not least my latest harebrained API design. I chalk that up to...

For a while now I've been thinking that the best way to get better at API & protocol design is to try to articulate how you do design. Articulating your thought process has a number of significant benefits: Once you know your approach you can critique...

If you didn't get to TechEd - no problem - videos of all the sessions are available here . Including my Best Practices: Creating an OData Service using WCF Data Services session . If you watch that video and want to follow try it out - you can download...

At TechEd I got a lot of questions about how to expose Data as OData By now you probably know you can use Data Services and the Entity Framework to expose data from a database as an OData Service. You might even know you can use Data Services with...

Yesterday I promised to share all the code from my Best Practices – Creating an OData Service using WCF Data Services session at TechED. Note: you can find a recording of that session here . So here goes, essentially this is what I did: ...

Background info: This post builds on Parts 1 thru 8 which teach you how to create a typed Data Service Provider. But now the part we’ve all been waiting for- an un-typed DSP – which is what I expect most real world DSP implementations will be based on...

Over the last couple of years I’ve found myself in lots of situations where I’ve wanted to get ‘under the hood’ and see what is happening inside an IQueryable, but I haven’t had an easy solution, at least until now. Getting down and dirty like this...

In parts 1 thru 7 we made a Read / Write typed data service provider, although it was a little simplistic because it didn’t have relationships. So lets rectify that right now by adding a relationship to make this more 'real-world' Changes to our Classes...

There are many good arguments for hiding away the lower layers in your stack – essentially the building blocks upon which your public API is built - however the ‘ we don’t have the time and resources to test that layer completely ’ argument seems a little...

Background: While writing the update post in my Data Service Provider series I ended up writing this block of reflection code to copy properties values from one object to another: foreach (var prop in resourceType .Properties .Where(p => (p.Kind &...

If you are trying to use POCO classes in EF 4.0, it is relatively easy to run into problems with the mapping from your model to your CLR classes. If you get any nasty problems here, the best way to get to the bottom of things is to try to explicitly...

In Parts 1 thru 6 we created a custom Read/Only provider over an in memory list of Products. Now it’s time to add update support. To do that we need to add an implementation of IDataServiceUpdateProvider . But first lets talk about the… Implications...

By default when you add a Data Service Service Reference you get automatic code-generation, which produces a strongly typed DataServiceContext and classes for all your ResourceTypes. You can have a look at this generated code if you ‘show all files...

In Tip 45 I showed you how to build a connection string at runtime, which is pretty nifty. The problem with that was that it relies on having metadata files (.csdl .ssdl and .msl) on local disk. But what if they live on a web-server or something...

Whenever I find myself implementing a series of interfaces to plug into a framework or server, I always find myself wondering how the server will call my implementations. For me this is about forming a mental model to simplify how I think about what...

In Part 4 of our series showing how to implement a Custom Data Service Provider we hooked up an incomplete implementation of IDataServiceQueryProvider , just enough to get the ServiceDocument and $metadata working. In this part we’ll get query working...

Recently I’ve been spending some of my time playing with JQuery . And because Data Services can expose data in JSON format, I thought I’d use JQuery to grab some data from a Data Service. Turns out it is pretty simple. This example isn’t going...

This is Part 4 of my ongoing series of posts showing how to create an Custom Data Service Provider . NOTE: I’ve done a little refactoring to the code in Part 3 to simplify the code in this post, so be sure to check that out if you’ve been following along...