Updates to URL syntax for December CTP of ADO.NET Data Services
This post talks a bit about updates from the last post on the URI format.
In that post, we discussed how we were considering having a "full form" and a "compressed form" for syntax. With the convergence of using ATOM and JSON as the serialization formats, we’ve been able to converge on the URI format as well and thus we no longer have both forms - we simply have the resource set name and a comma-separated list of key values in parents: /Customers('ALFKI')
The use of parens for values is a classic CSV-style design: a character to separate (,); a character to delimit the values so you can include the separator in them ('Lopez Ruiz, Marcelo','another string'), and a convention to double the delimiter to use it ('Marcelo''s World','Party time! Excellent!').
There are other types that don't really require delimiters, like dates, but because they come in handy when used in expressions on the query side of the string (after the '?'), we've kept them in the key portion as well. This way client libraries only need to deal with a single format. If this doesn't make much sense, wait a bit and I'll go into it in a post in the near future.
Everything else works pretty much as described in the post - feel free to post here or in the forums if you have any questions or want to provide feedback on this.
This post is part of the transparent design exercise in the Astoria Team. To understand how it works and how your feedback will be used please look at this post.
