Entity Framework Provider (WCF Data Services)
Important
WCF Data Services has been deprecated and will no longer be available for download from the Microsoft Download Center. WCF Data Services supported earlier versions of the Microsoft OData (V1-V3) protocol only and has not been under active development. OData V1-V3 has been superseded by OData V4, which is an industry standard published by OASIS and ratified by ISO. OData V4 is supported through the OData V4 compliant core libraries available at Microsoft.OData.Core. Support documentation is available at OData.Net, and the OData V4 service libraries are available at Microsoft.AspNetCore.OData.
RESTier is the successor to WCF Data Services. RESTier helps you bootstrap a standardized, queryable, HTTP-based REST interface in minutes. Like WCF Data Services before it, Restier provides simple and straightforward ways to shape queries and intercept submissions before and after they hit the database. And like Web API + OData, you still have the flexibility to add your own custom queries and actions with techniques you're already familiar with.
Like WCF Data Services, the ADO.NET Entity Framework is based on the Entity Data Model, which is a type of entity-relationship model. The Entity Framework translates operations against its implementation of the Entity Data Model, which is called the conceptual model, into equivalent operations against a data source. This makes the Entity Framework an ideal provider for data services that are based on relational data, and any database that has a data provider that supports the Entity Framework can be used with WCF Data Services. For a list of the data sources that currently support the Entity Framework, see Entity Framework Providers.
In a conceptual model, the entity container is the root of the service. You must define a conceptual model in the Entity Framework before the data can be exposed by a data service. For more information, see How to: Create a Data Service Using an ADO.NET Entity Framework Data Source.
WCF Data Services supports the optimistic concurrency model by enabling you to define a concurrency token for an entity. This concurrency token, which includes one or more properties of the entity, is used by the data service to determine whether a change has occurred in the data that is being requested, updated, or deleted. When token values obtained from the eTag in the request differ from the current values of the entity, an exception is raised by the data service. To indicate that a property is part of the concurrency token, you must apply the attribute ConcurrencyMode="Fixed" in the data model defined by the Entity Framework provider. The concurrency token cannot include a key property or a navigation property. For more information, see Updating the Data Service.
To learn more about the Entity Framework, see Entity Framework Overview.