Accessing the Service from a Web Browser (ADO.NET Data Services Quickstart)

In this task, you will start the data service from Visual Studio and optionally disable feed reading in the Web browser. You will then retrieve the service definition document as well as access data service resources by submitting HTTP GET requests through a Web browser to the exposed resources.

Note

By default, Visual Studio auto-assigns a port number to the localhost URI on your computer. This documentation uses the port number 12345 in most of the URI examples. For more information about how to set a specific port number in your Visual Studio project, see Creating the Data Service (ADO.NET Data Services Quickstart).

To request the default service document

1. In Internet Explorer, from the Tools menu, select Internet Options, click the Content tab, click Settings, and clear Turn on feed viewing.

   This ensures that feed reading is disabled. If you do not disable this functionality, then the Web browser will treat the returned AtomPub encoded document as an XML feed instead of displaying the raw XML data.

2. In Visual Studio, press the F5 key to start debugging the application.

3. Open a Web browser on the local computer. In the address bar, enter the following URI:

   https://localhost:12345/northwind.svc
   

   This returns the default service document, which contains a list of entity sets that are exposed by this data service.

To access entity set resources from a Web browser

1. In the address bar of your Web browser, enter the following URI:

   https://localhost:12345/northwind.svc/Customers
   

   This returns a set of all customers in the Northwind sample database.

2. In the address bar of your Web browser, enter the following URI:

   https://localhost:12345/northwind.svc/Customers('ALFKI')
   

   This returns an entity instance for the specific customer, ALFKI.

3. In the address bar of your Web browser, enter the following URI:

   https://localhost:12345/northwind.svc/Customers('ALFKI')/Orders
   

   This traverses the relationship between customers and orders to return a set of all orders for the specific customer ALFKI.

4. In the address bar of your Web browser, enter the following URI:

   https://localhost:12345/northwind.svc/Customers('ALFKI')/Orders?$filter=OrderID eq 10643
   

   This filters orders that belong to the specific customer ALFKI so that only a specific order is returned based on the supplied OrderID value.

Next Steps

You have successfully accessed the data service from a Web browser, with the browser issuing HTTP GET requests to specified resources. A Web browser provides an easy way to experiment with the addressing syntax of requests and view the results. However, a production data service is not generally accessed by this method. Typically, applications interact with the data service through application code or scripting languages. Next, you will create a client application that uses client libraries to access data service resources as if they were common language runtime (CLR) objects:

Creating the .NET Framework Client Application (ADO.NET Data Services Quickstart)

See Also

Other Resources

Addressing Resources (ADO.NET Data Services)

Making Changes to Data (ADO.NET Data Services)