Scott Hanselman

Creating an OData API for StackOverflow including XML and JSON in 30 minutes

March 28, 2010 Comment on this post [65] Posted in ASP.NET | OData | Open Source | Source Code
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I emailed Jeff Atwood last night a one line email. "You should make a StackOverflow API using OData." Then I realized that, as Linus says, Talk is Cheap, Show me the Code. So I created an initial prototype of a StackOverflow API using OData on an Airplane. I allocated the whole 12 hour flight. Unfortunately it took 30 minutes so I watched movies the rest of the time.

You can follow along and do this yourself if you like.

Preparation

Before I left for my flight, I downloaded two things.

First, I got Sam Saffron's "So Slow" StackOverflow SQL Server Importer. This is a little spike of Sam's that takes the 3gigs of XML Dump Files from StackOverflow's monthly dump and imports it into SQL Server.

Second, I got the StackOverflow Monthly Dump. I downloaded it with uTorrent and unzipped it in preparation for the flight.

Importing into SQL Server

I went into Visual Studio 2010 (although I could have used 2008, I like the Entity Framework improvements in 2010 enough that it made this job easier). I right clicked on the Data Connections node in the Server Explorer and created a database in SQL Express called, ahem, "StackOverflow."

 Create New SQL Server Database

Next, I opened up Sam's RecreateDB.sql file from his project in Visual Studio (I avoid using SQL Server Management Studio when I can) and connected to the ".\SQLEXPRESS" instance, selected the new StackOverflow database and hit "execute."

Recreate DB SQL inside of Visual Studio

One nit about Sam's SQL file, it creates tables that line up nicely with the dump, but it includes no referential integrity. The tables don't know about each other and there's no cardinality setup. I've overwritten the brain cells in my head that know how to do that stuff without Google Bing so I figured I'd deal with it later. You will too.

Next, I opened Sam's SoSlow application and ran it. Lovely little app that works as advertised with a gloriously intuitive user interface. I probably would have named the "Import" button something like "Release the Hounds!" but that's just me.

So Slow ... Stack Overflow database importer

At this point I have a lovely database of a few hundred megs filled with StackOverflow's public data.

image

Making a Web Project and an Entity Model

Now, from within Visual Studio I selected File | New Project | ASP.NET Web Application. Then I right clicked on the resulting project and selected Add | New Item, then clicked Data, then ADO.NET Entity Data Model.

Add New Item - StackOveflow

What's the deal with that, Hanselman? You know StackOverflow uses LINQ to SQL? Have you finally sold out and are trying to force Entity Framework on us sneakily within this cleverly disguised blog post?

No. I used EF for a few reasons. One, it's fast enough (both at runtime and at design time) in Visual Studio 2010 that I don't notice the difference anymore. Two, I knew that the lack of formal referential integrity was going to be a problem (remember I mentioned that earlier?) and since LINQ to SQL is 1:1 physical/logical and EF offers flexible mapping, I figured it be easier with EF. Thirdly, "WCF Data Services" (the data services formerly known as ADO.NET Data Services or "Astoria") maps nicely to EF.

I named it StackOverflowEntities.edmx and selected "Update Model from Database" and selected all the tables just to get started. When the designer opened, I noticed there were no reference lines, just tables in islands by themselves.

The Initial Entity Model

So I was right about there being no relationships between the tables in SQL Server. If I was a smarter person, I'd have hooked up the SQL to include these relationships, but I figured I could add them here as well as a few other things that would make our OData Service more pleasant to use.

I started by looking at Posts and thinking that if I was looking at a Post in this API, I'd want to see Comments. So, I right-clicked on a Post and click Add | Association. The dialog took me a second to understand (I'd never seen it before) be then I realized that it was creating an English sentence at the bottom, so I just focused on getting that sentence correct.

In this case, "Post can have * (Many) instances of Comment. Use Post.Comments to access the Comment instances. Comment can have 1 (One) instance of Post. Use Comment.Post to access the Post instance." was exactly what I wanted. I also already had the foreign keys properties, so I unchecked that and clicked OK.

Add Association 

That got me here in the Designer. Note the line with the 1...* and the Comments Navigation Property on Post and the Post Navigation Property on Comment. That all came from that dialog.

Posts relate to Comments

Next, I figured since I didn't have it auto-generate the foreign key properties, I'd need to map them myself. I double clicked on the Association Line. I selected Post as the Principal and mapped its Id to the PostId property in Comments.

Referential Constraint

Having figured this out, I just did the same thing a bunch more times for the obvious stuff, as seen in this diagram where Users have Badges, and Posts have Votes, etc.

A more complete StackOverflow Entity Model with associations completed

Now, let's make a service.

Creating an OData Service

Right-click on the Project in Solution Explorer and select Add | New Item | Web | WCF Data Service. I named mine Service.svc. All you technically need to do to have a full, working OData service is add a class in between the angle brackets (DataService<YourTypeHere>) and include one line for config.EntitySetAccessRule. Here's my initial minimal class. I added the SetEntitySetPageSize after I tried to get all the posts. ;)

public class Service : DataService<StackOverflowEntities>
{
// This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies.
public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)
{
config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead);

//Set a reasonable paging site
config.SetEntitySetPageSize("*", 25);

config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;
}
}

Expanding on this class, I added caching, and an example Service Operation, as well as WCF Data Services support for JSONP. Note that the Service Operation is just an example there to show StackOverflow that they CAN have total control. Using OData doesn't mean checking a box and putting your database on the web. It means exposing specific entities with as much or as little granularity as you like. You can intercept queries, make custom behaviors (like the JSONP one), make custom Service Operations (they can include query strings, of course), and much more. OData supports JSON natively and will return JSON when an accept: header is set, but I added the JSONP support to allow cross-domain use of the service as well as allow the format parameter in the URL, which is preferred by man as it's just easier.

namespace StackOveflow
{
[JSONPSupportBehavior]
public class Service : DataService<StackOverflowEntities>
{
// This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies.
public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)
{
config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.AllRead);

//This could be "*" and could also be ReadSingle, etc, etc.
config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("GetPopularPosts", ServiceOperationRights.AllRead);

//Set a reasonable paging site
config.SetEntitySetPageSize("*", 25);

config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2;
}

protected override void OnStartProcessingRequest(ProcessRequestArgs args)
{
base.OnStartProcessingRequest(args);
//Cache for a minute based on querystring
HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;
HttpCachePolicy c = HttpContext.Current.Response.Cache;
c.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.ServerAndPrivate);
c.SetExpires(HttpContext.Current.Timestamp.AddSeconds(60));
c.VaryByHeaders["Accept"] = true;
c.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Charset"] = true;
c.VaryByHeaders["Accept-Encoding"] = true;
c.VaryByParams["*"] = true;
}

[WebGet]
public IQueryable<Post> GetPopularPosts()
{
var popularPosts = (from p in this.CurrentDataSource.Posts
orderby p.ViewCount
select p).Take(20);

return popularPosts;
}
}
}

But what does this get us? So what?

Accessing StackOverflow's Data via OData

Well, if I hit http://mysite/service.svc I see this service. Note the relative HREFs.

Screenshot of an XML document describing an OData service endpoint

If I hit http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts I get the posts (paged, as I mentioned). Look real close in there. Notice the <link> stuff before the content? Notice the relative href="Posts(23)"?

StackOverflow Posts in OData

Remember all those associations I set up before? Now I can see:

But that's just navigation. I can also do queries. Go download LINQPad Beta for .NET 4. Peep this. Click on Add Connection, and put in my little Orcsweb test server.

Disclaimer: This is a test server that Orcsweb may yank at any moment. Note also, that you can sign up for your own at http://www.vs2010host.com or find a host at ASP.NET or host your own OData in the cloud.

I put this in and hit OK.

LINQPad Connection String

Now I'm writing LINQ queries against StackOverflow over the web. No Twitter-style API, JSON or otherwise can do this. StackOverflow data was meant for OData. The more I mess around with this, the more I realize it's true.

LINQPad 4

This LINQ query actually turns into this URL. Again, you don't need .NET for this, it's just HTTP:

',Tags)">',Tags)">http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts()?$filter=substringof('SQL',Title) or substringof('<sql-server>',Tags)

Try the same thing with an accept header of accept: application/json or just add $format=json

',Tags)&$format=json">',Tags)&$format=json">http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts()?$filter=substringof('SQL',Title) or substringof('<sql-server>',Tags)&$format=json

It'll automatically return the same data as JSON or Atom, as you like.

If you've got Visual Studio, just go bust out a Console App real quick. File | New Console App, then right-click in references and hit Add Service Reference. Put in http://173.46.159.103/service.svc and hit OK.

Add Service Reference

Try something like this. I put the URIs in comments to show you there's no trickery.

class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
StackOverflowEntities so = new StackOverflowEntities(new Uri("http://173.46.159.103/service.svc"));

//{http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Users()?$filter=substringof('Hanselman',DisplayName)}
var user = from u in so.Users
where u.DisplayName.Contains("Hanselman")
select u;

//{http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts()?$filter=OwnerUserId eq 209}
var posts =
from p in so.Posts
where p.OwnerUserId == user.Single().Id
select p;

foreach (Post p in posts)
{
Console.WriteLine(p.Body);
}

Console.ReadLine();
}
}

I could keep going with examples in PHP, JavaScript, etc, but you get the point.

Conclusion

StackOverflow has always been incredibly open and generous with their data. I propose that an OData endpint would give us much more flexible access to their data than a custom XML and/or JSON API that they'll need be constantly rev'ing.

With a proprietary API, folks will rush to create StackOverflow clients in many languages, but that work is already done with OData including libraries for iPhone, PHP and Java. There's a growing list of OData SDKs that could all be used to talk to a service like this. I could load it into Excel using PowerPivot if I like as well.

Also, this service could totally be extended beyond this simple GET example. You can do complete CRUD with OData and it's not tied to .NET in anyway. TweetDeck for StackOverflow perhaps?

I propose we encourage StackOverflow to put more than the 30 minutes that I have put into it and make a proper OData service for their data, rather than a custom API. I volunteer to help. If not, we can do it ourselves with their dump data (perhaps weekly if they can step it up?) and a cloud instance.

Thoughts?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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March 28, 2010 21:38
Fantastic work Scott!

This really shows off the power of OData and the VS tooling.

But what are the performance implications of allowing people to run arbitrary queries on your DB? DOS seems inevitable.

I was initially turned off by OData for its horrendous URL query syntax. But I find that if I just don't look at those (treat them as assembler), then OData is quite nice. Funny how a small detail like that can make you dislike an entire technology.
March 28, 2010 21:39
Scott, Great post as always.
I do think that opening StackOverflow via any medium, be it OData or any other type of service, will bring StackOverflow to new heights.
I think as a community, we could easily help Jeff and the team create an open source SO API. If you would like some help, I'm sure lots of volunteers would jump at the opportunity.

Entity Framework is awesome, since the announcement of OData, I think it's elevated or re-energized EF and lots of devs are revisiting this technology.

Thank you once again for an awesome and informative post
March 28, 2010 21:50
Great Scott! What a post!

It does indeed show off OData with a flourish. I've always found real world examples of technology much easier to grok than abstract examples.

Furthermore, you do make a compelling case for the use of OData as an API in and of itself, and for where it fits in with other technologies. I know that alot of people, myself included, watched the Mix10 keynote and groaned. Since this had every chance of being Yet Another Protocol.

I must say that you guys have pitched OData just right, appealing to those, like me, who are in want of something better, while respecting the adherents of everything else. You certainly didn't come across and say that OData is the One True Way.

I look forward to more OData posts from you, and I'll definitely be using it in my own projects.

Thanks a lot.

Roberto
March 28, 2010 21:55
30 minutes? Were those "Hanselminutes", or 30 actual minutes? :)

Great post, Scott, but I agree with Frank that controls will have to be put in place to prevent a DOS attack.
March 28, 2010 22:11
that's an interesting url in the linqpad connection dialog :)
March 28, 2010 22:24
You actually have a lot of control over what you allow folks to do. First, they aren't running arbitrary queries over your DB, they are running constrained queries over your Entities. Anything that's IQueryable. The things you expose don't even have to have a DB behind them. Also, notice where I set EntitySetRights.AllRead. I could have said SingleRead, or a half-dozen other choices. You can also intercept queries and constrain them (gold, silver members, for example.) You could require an API key for intense queries or queries that return more than x records. Notice that I put in paging as well. You could notice more than n pages and slow them down. It's all just HTTP (it's not a database connection, just REST calls.)

Does that help?
March 29, 2010 0:08
Thanks. Good set of tools to create rich applications. I think that i will try to use all of them in my new projects.
March 29, 2010 1:01
You don't need the $format=JSON at the end of your URLs to get JSON back (nor do you need the JSONSupportBehavior, Scott). This is useful if you need JSON from a GET where you don't get to set the headers. However, from inside a web page, where you're most likely to want JSON, you just need to set the Accept header to "application/json" to get back JSON, which comes out of the box with every Data Services endpoint.

What that means is that if you're using a modern client-side JScript library, you don't have to set the header or put the $format=JSON on the end of the URL at all, e.g. here's how you'd do it in jQuery:

<html>
<head>
<title>OData JSON Test</title>
<script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$("#foo").text("fetching...");
var url = "http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts(23)/";
$.getJSON(url, function (result) {
$("#foo").html(result.d.Body);
});

});
</script>
<p id="foo">loading page...</p>
</body>
</html>


If you save this HTML to your hard drive and serve it up from your web server or just surf to it directly, you'll see the Body of Post 23 as fetched from Scott's OData endpoint. Enjoy.
March 29, 2010 1:29
I like the control that you get with OData, problem is that it's hard to express any constratins in the metadata today although I know the OData folks are thinking about this. The 2 things that concern me are queries that cause my service to fall over due to the processing cost, and transfer costs of arbitrary projections over my data; If I have a really popular data set, I'd like to reduce costs by supporting edge caching so I'd like to be able to limit the projections as well as constrain the paging. Another minor issue is that even if you support paging, getting paging to perform well over a really large SQL table can cost.

1. Costly Queries: The accesss policies are a huge help here, I think the right use of QueryInterceptors and ChangeInterceptors is another useful option here. I'd love to see a simple way of limiting the set of valid predicates in a way that surfaces the "rules" in metadata. I don't see how to do this with a QueryInterceptor attribute today. One option instead is to set ReadSingle as your policy and the expose the entity set in queryable ways through additional service operations that support querying with predicates that you know your database has indexes for.

2. Cacheable Results: I'd like to be able to have an approach to lists that is more like IEnumerable than IList. Also, if I could create a set of named projections, my freemium data feed could limit free queries to cache-friendly sets. Again, I think you could do this with custom service operations today.
March 29, 2010 1:58
This is a great post I didn't really get the point of OData, WCF data services... even after listening to the podcast on it. Being able to perform LINQ queries on the entities exposed is a great way to show it's power.
March 29, 2010 3:02
Thanks for this post Scott!

Question: Can you explain a bit more or point to more info about how to do odata caching? Re: your example OnStartProcessingRequest, there's a "return" on the second line so your caching logic doesn't actually get executed, right? Also I presume this is browser/client-side caching that's intended?
Thanks,
-djl
March 29, 2010 3:29
Interesting Post, Scott :)

Similar to the first post by Frank Krueger, I too felt that there was a lot of smell with both the result xml and the url to request the data. Is it possible to maybe customise the response .. to make it a wee bit cleaner? I feel that having a clean and short response structure helps make the API more usable (lower barrier to entry).

Secondly, is it possible to add some authentication against service calls? For example, simple querystring authentication or even better, basic authentication against particular services only (instead of the entire service) .. (and yes, I understand the security implications of using Basic Auth over no-SSL).

Lastly .... will OData be the recommendation for ASP.NET MVC sites who wish to have a json/xml API ?

Thanks Scott for the post -- please keep these OData + ASP.NET MVC posts coming .. and in the short term :)

-J-
PK
March 29, 2010 6:50
Dana - That return; was a fat fingering. It's not that way live. I updated the site.

Chris- JSON != JSONP. I realize that JSON support is built in, sorry if it wasn't clear from the post. JSON can only be used on the same domain, while JSONP is needed to access this data from the web from another domain. However, many folks *like* the ease of $format=json feature and it's used for cross domain calls. I can use straight JSON locally, sure, but as the community will want to use this from *their* domain as it's a service, therefore I *do* need JSONP added.
March 29, 2010 8:53
Scott

Great example of using OData. Looking forward to your sessions on DevDays 2010 tomorrow.

Kind regards
March 29, 2010 10:09
Great article. Really shows the power of WCF Data Services and the OData protocol. Pablo Castro and his team rock!

I absolutely agree that this could be an excellent interface on Stack Overflow. Rather than designing a complete interface from scratch, which Jeff and Joel admit in their podcast is very difficult. I think SO's data is very well suited for a data centric interface like this.

Thanks for the nice tutorial! Have fun in my little country this week @ DevDays 2010.
Roy
March 29, 2010 10:27
It's kinda freay how similar OData is to this one project I'm working on, only my project is domain specific. It definitely wasn't as easy as your 30 minute adventures. I'd credit SO and the tooling, but it's certainly interesting. I''m wonder a little if this was an option and considered when the big wigs were deciding what to use.
March 29, 2010 15:25
Hi Scott,

Great article! I will definitely take a look at the new EF and at OData.

Christina
March 29, 2010 19:22
What are the implications of binding directly to your model?

It seems to me that if you change the definition of "Post" then any consumer of the interface will break once you post that change. This is the same problem we have with SOAP web services bound directly to the domain model -- you inevitably end up writing some "message" objects that you translate from domain <-> message for use in your service layer.

Do you suggest that we need to have two Models? One that we use internally and one that we use to bind our services to? You're then in the same boat as if you'd created the interface from scratch (double maintenance, etc.)...
March 29, 2010 19:33
Sean - Good question. For the purposes of this example, and any real implementation of an OData service, I would use custom Entities (a kind of data-specific "View Model"). I would have two models. I would have whatever I had for my app and another one for the OData Service. It'll give you more control.

As for changing stuff, there's two things that could change - the database or the entity model. Because I'm using the Entity Framework (or if I was using any ORM), I can always map the Entity Model to the physical database to maintain things. I could change a table name or a datatype and map them for the most part. If the service itself changes/versions, it would depend (as it does with all web services.) There's no silver bullet. I like to version my services with dates in the URL, so http://foo.com/2010/03/service.svc, etc.
March 29, 2010 20:03
That's great. I'm learning how to create Pivot collections, I'd like to try to make one out of the SO OData.
March 29, 2010 21:25
Scott,

Great article, would also like to thank you for the link to: http://www.orcsweb.com, been researching ASP.NET Hosting and they seem great. Is that a Microsoft hosting venture? They offer a pretty stellar package for pretty cheap!

Thanks,
Eric
March 30, 2010 2:43
Hi Scott

Thanks for a great article - not sure what's changed but

http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts()?$filter=substringof('SQL',Title) or substringof('<sql-server>',Tags) is returning

ie returning 500 : A potentially dangerous Request.QueryString value was detected from the client ($filter="...stringof('<sql-server>',Tags)").
March 30, 2010 16:43
Great post Scott,

Now I'll start working on OData,
March 30, 2010 17:22
Did you have to do something special to get HttpContext to not be null?
March 30, 2010 18:29
What a great post! Hope your in-flight was fun!
March 30, 2010 20:21
Great tutorial, Scott.

Here are links to a couple of my tutorials for OData from SQL Azure, which eliminate the need for rolling your own Entity Data Model if your database has relationships defined:

Querying OData.org’s SQL Azure Northwind Sample Data Service

Enabling and Using the OData Protocol with SQL Azure

Cheers,

--rj
March 30, 2010 21:40
I love how quick one can build a data service with WCF Data Services. Kudos for a great demonstration of it!

It may be an operation, but GetPopularPosts must already be accessed with the HTTP Get verb. Don't you think it would be more RESTful to change its name to PopularPosts?
March 31, 2010 0:11
Sean Storey - Ya, remove the angle brackets. It doesn't work when I have request validation on.

Patrick - Under what context are you running it? If it's under IIS or the VS Web Server it'll be not-null. You can remove it if it's a problem, but it enables caching.

Roger - Thanks for sharing the links!

Chris Eargle - Agreed, that would be more RESTful. That's my old WS-*.* personality showing.

March 31, 2010 1:00
Great work Scott! This really helped me out!
March 31, 2010 1:23
Very nice. I just realized how cool OData is.
March 31, 2010 6:16
The real sweet spot would be, of course, to support the full OData protocol against the *real* StackOverflow data.

Otherwise, a read-only and slightly dated snapshot of the data isn't as useful.

But this showcases something else too: you CAN continue to use whatever technology you use internally, and still leverage EF+WCF Data Services to quickly expose what you want (even allow controlled writes with interceptors that call your existing biz logic if it's properly isolated behind entity interfaces!).

I'd love to see this adopted for StackOverflow. I'm willing to help and build the coolest VS integration for it you can think of ;)
March 31, 2010 6:50
I just have one thing to say:

"Very Nice!"

PK :-)
PK
March 31, 2010 14:45
Hey Scott,

The PowerPivot link at the end of the post seem to be referring to the service on the OrcsWeb test site.
March 31, 2010 14:46
seems* [ damn ]
March 31, 2010 19:23
Tangential, but: Is there a specific reason to avoid using SSMS? Is it just a personal quirk? A developer mindset thing? Or is there a problem with using SSMS to do management tasks?
March 31, 2010 20:25
I love the way you merged your "in-flight 30 minute coding spree" into your presentation about MVC 2 at DevDays 2010 in The Hague. I really enjoyed your, most of the time hillarious, contribution to this event. Didn't miss a single minute ;)

March 31, 2010 22:55
Patrick - check your web.config - make sure aspNetCompatibilityEnabled is enabled under <system.serviceModel>:

<system.serviceModel>
<serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" />
</system.serviceModel>



April 02, 2010 19:17
Regarding GetPopularPosts operation! It returns IQueryable!! And as far as I know once the result delivered to the client it will be in form of IEnumerable?! as the query will be evaluated and executed on the server while the client just recieves the results.

So my question is which is better, to keep it as IQueryable or change it to something else e.g. ICollection or IEnumerable?
April 03, 2010 4:50
Nice work, Scott.

Here is an alternate dump loader that is pretty darn quick and supports sql server, mysql and sqlite.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/45333/fast-multi-platform-data-dump-import-sql-2000-05-08-sqlite-mysql
April 03, 2010 6:20
Mohammed,
If the Service Operation returns an IQueryable , then you can further compose on top of the results and the query will be executed on the server side.
You can filter the results via the $filter query operation on the server side , projection works too .

For example , you can filter the popular posts by the view count
http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/GetPopularPosts?filter=ViewCount eq 0
get only the body of the Popular posts.
http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/GetPopularPosts?filter=ViewCount eq 0&$select=Body

Phani
http://blogs.msdn.com/PhaniRaj
April 06, 2010 0:52
@Phani, This is really valuable information! I didn't know that I can do that, and the query will be executed on the server side!!
I was confused till I noticed that no service operations are being generated on service client code!!
And I noticed that Excute method returns IEnumrable!
So I'm supposed to form my Request Uri that I want to execute
Thank you for the hint.
April 08, 2010 18:09
Why all these queries
e.g. http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts(23)/

are returning xml based response. Shouldn't they be returning JSON format as scott has already put [JSONPSupportBehavior] at the top? Or does the service return response based on the client requesting the response? Got confusion here?

I am used to JSON writing asp.net mvc apps but I am new to WCF, data services, EF, and OData. I also read on www.OData.org website that OData supports two formats for representing the resources (Collections, Entries, Links, etc) it exposes: the XML-based AtomPub format and the JSON format.

Regards,
Nabeel
April 08, 2010 21:20
To get JSON over XML you need to either add $format=json or include an accept header with application/json.
April 09, 2010 2:51
Thanks Scott. I just noticed that you have already mentioned that in your article.

I got another question though. As you know JSONP is for cross domain calls. The following JQuery code, posted earlier by Dan, seems to be working from my machine though. And its returning valid JSON response without appending url with "?$format=json" in $.getJSON() url.


<html>
<head>
<title>OData JSON Test</title>
<script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function () {
$("#foo").text("fetching...");
var url = "http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts(23)/";
$.getJSON(url, function (result) {
$("#foo").html(result.d.Body);
});
});
</script>
<p id="foo">loading page...</p>
</body>
</html>
April 09, 2010 4:38
That might work locally, but it won't work when you host it on the real internet.
April 09, 2010 17:34
Scott,
Cool idea, took your idea and extended it further by including reactive extensions to it.

Using OData , LINQPad, Reactive Extensions (Rx) to query stackoverflow


Thanks
Naveen

April 10, 2010 14:34
I like this example - nice to see a concrete example on usage.

However, from a practical point of view (e.g. if i was writing my own interface to a system) i'm not sure i like it - certainly not in a public sense and as a default data access mechanism.

I still see more value in structured API's that encapsulate this kind of data - where there could be value is in *others* being able to write API's over your oData services. Effectively you could have distributed API's for your system.

I can imagine this being powerful for data integration but less so for normal devs.

Given me a bit to think on.
April 12, 2010 17:51
Hi Scott,

The service is not local..It's been hosted by you on some machine...isn't it?..look at the service url http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts(23)/ ... Its already on the internet?

Regards
Nabeel
April 15, 2010 17:48
@Nabeel

http://localhost/ or http://[my IP machine]/ or http://[my machine name]/

is exactly the same call, but to access local websites is always better to NOT use localhost as, for example, IE bypasses all proxies you might have (so it will not work with Fidller) and for services is always better and more reliable to use IP or machine name, never localhost.
April 15, 2010 22:00
If you have localhost stuff you want to use Fiddler with it, you can just say http://ipv4.fiddler/yoursite and it'll work.
April 20, 2010 14:20
It seems I'm stuck at the first hurdle... I thought I could maybe do this to open up our business data, but it seems our business data is stuck in a timewarp -- I got the message "This server is not supported. You must have Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or later." This was when setting up the Entity Data Model. Is there a way I could still achieve the end result though? Thanks.
April 21, 2010 7:37
If a Post object has a collection of Tags then using Linq how would you query for all Posts that had a particular Tag? Is this possible? I'm trying something similar with the Netflix OData feed by trying to get all Titles in a particular Genre. So far no examples of this type of issue exist. Thanks
May 07, 2010 20:49

Thanks for your reply... I tried LINQ to SQL too which I've read supports SQL Server 2000 (with some caveats), but I couldn't get a connection to the database -- the same error : "This server is not supported. You must have Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or later". I'm using VS2010, don't know if that makes any difference. Would I have to manually configure this somewhere? Sorry I'm being a bit dim. Thanks again.

May 11, 2010 15:52

Turns out that VS2010 has removed support for SQL 2000, so I'll probably have to reinstall VS2008 to get the connectivity...
May 12, 2010 7:13
Awesome post. I had been wanting to build something like this for another data source I have, but had not taken the time to do it. After reading your post I spent 15 minutes and had it up and running. Amazing.

oData combined with Entity Framework and WCF Data Services is SUCH a new powerful way to expose and consume data. Love the post, keep up the great work.
May 28, 2010 20:02
Scott,

Why is the Tags property one big string with tags delimited by angle brackets? Was this to work around a limitation in OData or it just how StackOverflow stores tags?

I'm asking because I've been trying to figure out how you can use OData to test for the presence of an element in a collection. Something like:

http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts()?$filter=contains('sql-server',Tags)

where Tags is an array, instead of:

http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Posts()?$filter=substringof('<sql-server>',Tags)

I've seen other solutions to this problem where they invert the query like this:

http://173.46.159.103/service.svc/Tags('sql-server')/Posts

but I'm still curious how we can perform queries that say, get me all the X, where its one-to-many property Y contains a Z.

If you have any insight, it's much appreciated.
May 29, 2010 1:05
It was a limitation of the way SO made their data. I could have fixed it, but I'd need to make a new Tags database table (they don't seem to have one) at the time of import.
June 12, 2010 8:47
Scott,
I have taken your sample and generated the OData and EF against a local database and it is sort of working. When I do the "View In Browser" on the .svc file, all works as expected, but... when I add the name of one of the database tables to the end of the query string, I get an HTTP 500 error. The same project works on another machine without any problems. I am running Windows XP with VS 2010.

Any idea of what might be causing the issue?

Thanks,

Eric
June 17, 2010 15:05
HttpCachePolicy would be nice if it would work :)

But never the less, I get a hit on the server side for each and every request.
My other data service is based on a Linq-to-sql and I can see that it reaches the database everytime, even with those caching settings when the request starts.

However, it would be interesting how we can define SqlCachdeDependency and the server to get returning 304-not modified results!

Any advices/examples are welcome!
July 14, 2010 21:37
Thanks Scott, really enjoyed your recent MVC/.NET4.0 talks.

For anyone following along ...

If you get the following error msg when trying to save your .edmx after adding associations:

"Error 113: Multiplicity is not valid in Role ....."

You have to go the the foreign key fields (property) and set them to nullable=false. Ex. for the UserPost association, a Post MUST contain a UserID (OwnerUserID). Right click on OwnerUserID, choose properties, and set Nullable = false. Repeat for all foreign keys used in your associations.
September 02, 2010 16:25
Hi Scott,

a quick question: is it possible to specify that certain fields on an entity/table are not exposed? It seems like the config.SetEntitySetAccessRule does only apply to the entity/table itself and does not support more granular control.

Thanks,

/Jesper
Copenhagen, Denmark
October 12, 2010 3:58
Thanks for the post, helped me a lot when getting EF working with an existing dataase schema.
November 24, 2010 9:51
New in .Net 4.0, you can add the crossDomainScriptAccessEnabled="true" to your endpoint binding configuration to support jsonp. This works great for wcf services, but is there a way to enable jsonp for my wcf data services?

I've used the JSONPBehavior attribute that Adam Kahtava created, but wondered if there was a way right out of the box.

Thanks for your help.
Nathan
November 24, 2010 10:17
...actually I can't get it to work with wcf services in Azure either. Is that not supported in Azure?

Thanks
@nato24
November 25, 2010 7:25
Stack Overflow now has Stack Exchange Data Explorer that supports OData:

http://odata.stackexchange.com/

Comments are closed.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.