Should i use wcf data services

Now create a web project or rather add a class library project. Let's maintain a little layering and separation of the business. The following are a simple step-by-step walkthrough, keeping in mind that someday some beginner new to VS might be having trouble with written instructions. The following shows creation of a Class Library: Name it "Demo. Model" as we're creating a sample service and this will work as Model Data for our service.

When you click Add, a popup will be waiting for your input. So either you can generate your entities from the database or you can just create an empty model which further can be used to generate your database.

Make your choice. But we're simply going to use the existing database as I already have a nice test database from Stackoverflow dumps. For creating the OData service we only need the Tables.

So after clicking "Finish" your Entities diagram should look like this. Note: - This article will only show you how to get the data from the OData service. Now proceed to adding a new Web project you should choose ASP. Net Empty website from the templates; see: Add the project reference Demo. Model to the newly added website. Now add a new item in the web project i. WCF Data service. Cache; c. SetCacheability HttpCacheability.

ServerAndPrivate ; c. SetExpires HttpContext. AddSeconds 60 ; c. Posts orderby p. ViewCount select p. In our case this class is SampleDbEntities. In second place 2 in image , we need to specify the entities that we want to expose via this service and the access rule for these entities.

Note: The EntitySetRights and ServiceOperationRights enumeration values is an important thing to look into to take finer control over the permissions. The easiest way to do this is to have a custom attribute which can monitor the request and apply the required headers before this request is processed. This class will internally use its custom message dispatch behavior to take care of the header information.

The resulting implementation of the class looks like:. Note: Looking at the implementation will make the internal processing of this component very clear.

Although, it might be little complicated and confusing for the beginner's to get the full understanding of these classes. Now if we need to access this WCF data service via a. NET client application, how can we do that. So let us create a simple website to see how we can consume this WCF data service in a step by step fashion.

WCF Data Services was just updated. New release launched. Check out all the new functionality. I found this disappointing. I hope I'm wrong on this and I'm just missing something. It still supports more than WebApi though. As of now to my understanding , there is no "Data Context" support on Client i. Silverlight, ASP. This can get tricky, specially with all the Async stuff going on.

You don't know which calls will come back first. So when dealing with Line of Business Apps, this is major issue for me. This is mainly based on productivity and maintainability. You can obsolulately build Apps without a Data Context. Having relational Entities loaded into memory asynchronously and having Two-Binding is really nice to have. I think it could. Also, I know I'm only mentioning. NET to. I'm currently researching which platform to use.

I hope others will join in the discussion and give their thoughts. I'm still deciding and would love to hear other opinions. I really think both are frameworks are great. I wonder if you have to even choose, why not use both if needed. Just a thought :. We believe that Web API provides the right platform for OData services going forward and as such will be investing primarily in that platform for OData server stacks.

We will of course continue to put significant resources into the OData core libraries and client, but we do plan to reduce investment in WCF Data Services as a stack for creating OData services.