Contents tagged with ADO.NET Data Services
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Getting rid of the magic strings in a WCF Data Service Client
One of the common problems that you might find when using the generated DataServiceContext for consuming an existing WCF data service is that you have magic strings everywhere for handling links (expanding, adding, deleting, etc). The problem with all those magic strings is that they make your code to compile correctly, but you might run into some error at runtime because you used a link that does not exist or it was just renamed.
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NHibernating a WCF Data Service
WCF Data Services ships with two built-in query providers, a query provider for Entity Framework that uses the CSL model to infer all the service metadata for the exposed entities and their associations, and another provider, a Reflection Provider that uses .NET reflection over the exposed object model to infer the same metadata.
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SO-Aware is here. A RESTful service repository
I am very proud to announce today the release of our product in Tellago Studios, SO-Aware, a RESTful service repository based on OData. The main difference between SO-Aware and other existing products is that everything is exposed as resources via OData feeds that can be retrieved or manipulated with standard http verbs like POST, PUT, GET or DELETE (All this is implemented with WCF data services).
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Specifying mime types for content in WCF Data Services
WCF Data Services provides an specific operator “$value” for retrieving the underline value of any of the properties in exposed resources. Let’s say you have a resource “Configuration” that exposes a field “Xml” whose content should be treated as a mime type “text/xml”. When you execute a query like this to retrieve the value of that field, “myService.svc/Configurations(1)/Xml/$value”, what you get is the content of that field but expressed as plain text (text/plain). This happens because the default behavior for WCF Data Services is to return most of the primitive types as “text/plain” and some others like byte arrays as “application/octet-stream”. So, how do you change that default behavior to retrieve property content with other mime types ?. Here is where the MimeTypeAttribute can be used to change that behavior.
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Implementing a generic repository for WCF data services
The repository implementation I am going to discuss here is not exactly what someone would call repository in terms of DDD, but it is an abstraction layer that becomes handy at the moment of unit testing the code around this repository. In other words, you can easily create a mock to replace the real repository implementation.
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Integrating WIF with WCF Data Services
A time ago I discussed how a custom REST Starter kit interceptor could be used to parse a SAML token in the Http Authorization header and wrap that into a ClaimsPrincipal that the WCF services could use. The thing is that code was initially created for Geneva framework, so it got deprecated quickly. I recently needed that piece of code for one of projects where I am currently working on so I decided to update it for WIF. As this interceptor can be injected in any host for WCF REST services, also represents an excellent solution for integrating claim-based security into WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services).
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OData to the rescue. Exposing the eventlog as a data feed
In one of the project where I was working one, we used the Microsoft Enterprise Library Exception Application Block integration with WCF for logging all the technical issues on the services/backend in Windows Event Log. This application block worked like a charm, all the errors were correctly logged on the Event Log without even needing to modify the service code. However, we also needed to provide a quick way to expose all those events to the different system users so they could get access to all the them remotely. In just a couple of minutes I came up with a simple solution based on ADO.NET Data Services. ADO.NET data services is very powerful in this sense, you only need to provide a IQueryable implementation, and that’s all. You get a RESTful service with rich query support for free.
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A Bad Idea, EF Entities over WCF
Do you want to see something very ugly ?. Try to send a complete EF entity directly as a data contract over the wire with WCF,
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Injecting Custom Logic in ADO.NET Data Services
ADO.NET Data services represent today one of the most powerful alternatives to build RESTful services in the .NET platform. This framework basically creates a RESTful API on top of any IQueryable data source. Most of the steps required to publish a set of resources through http and make them available for any client are automatically implemented.