As the name suggests, its a Silverlight application that can be installed in-browser and out of browser , and allows you to perform ad-hoc and guided queries across a given OData Service.
In the “OData SDK - Sample Code” section of http://www.odata.org/developers/odata-sdk
Yes, install the application out of browser by clicking the “Install” button and you will not need to have the CAP.xml or CrossDomain.xml file on the server-side to allow querying the OData Service.
Depending on whether you have a previous version of Silverlight installed, browsing to http://Silverlight.net/ODataExplorer will have one of the following effects :
a) If you have an older version of SL is installed, it will prompt you to upgrade to the required version of Silverlight and clicking on it will take you to the window shown below.
b) If you don’t have any version of Silverlight installed, you will see this icon :
Clicking the “Upgrade” or “Install” button will take you to this screen.
Now , don’t panic, since this is a Developer-only release of Silverlight 4 , you will need to install the developer runtime.
Click the link highlighted in the picture about , and you will be taken to this page : http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4/
In this page , select the “Windows Runtime” link under the “Get the Tools” section.
For brevity , here is the download link for the SL4 runtime.
Let’s look at an example of browsing to an OData Service using the explorer.
1. Navigate to http://silverlight.net/ODataExplorer
2. In the prompt that turns up , enter details for the Netflix service as shown below
Clicking “Ok” in the above dialog box will download the metadata and the service document for the netflix Data Service and show the Collections available in the Service document.
Selecting the name of a collection is going to cause the Explorer to hit the Collection root and download the OData feed for that collection. For example , selecting the CatalogTitles collection gives us this :
The navigation properties which are Links in the Data grid should allow you to drill further into the set.
Clicking on the “Raw” tab is going to show you details about the request and the raw view of the data.
You can change the content-type to be JSON and see the response in JSON format.
I’ll be doing more blog posts about using the Explorer and look forward to your comments/feedback. I’d be happy to answer any questions about the tech behind this tool and how you can use the metadata parser library which we use in this tool to discover entity sets and other associated metadata.
Hey,
I'm getting this error whilst trying to use this - http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/7619/screenshot20100329at023.png
Any OData service returns the same error.
ChrisNTR
Hi Chris,
Can you install the application Out Of Browser and try to access the data service again ? We know of a couple of issues with different browsers which could cause this issue. This should be fixed in the next release soon enough.
Thanks for your patience with this .
what about a new version with insert/delete functionality..is there a plan to release it some day?
thanks.
Could you add authentication to the explorer? I get authentication errors when using it against my odata service since it requires credentials.
Matt,
We'll work on authentication for the next release of the explorer.
Phani
In the Netflix example, if I try to drill further down into the dataset, I get an error saying "Object reference not set to an instance of an object"
"at OData.Silverlight.EDMModel.GetEntityType(Entityset entitySet)..."
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