WCF Data Services 5.5.0 Prerelease

It’s that time again: yesterday we uploaded an RC for the upcoming 5.5.0 release. The 5.5.0 release will be another NuGet-only release.

What is in the release:

This release has two primary features: 1) significant enhancements to the URI parser and 2) public data source providers.

URI Parser

In the 5.2.0 release ODataLib provided a way to parse $filter and $orderby expressions into a metadata-bound abstract syntax tree (AST). In the 5.5.0 release we have updated the URI parser with support for most OData URIs. The newly introduced support for parsing $select and $expand is particularly notable. With the 5.5.0 release the URI Parser is mostly done. Future releases will focus on higher-order functions to further improve the developer experience.

Note: We are still trying to determine what the right API is for $select and $expand. While the API may change before RTM, the feature is functionally complete.

Public Data Source Providers

In this release we have made the Entity Framework and Reflection data source providers public. This gives more control to service writers. There is more work planned in the future but the work we’ve completed allows some advanced scenarios which were not possible earlier. For example, a service writer can now make use of the Entity Framework query-caching feature by intercepting the request and parameterizing the LINQ query before handing it off to Entity Framework. (Note that parameterizing a LINQ query is not the same as parameterizing a SQL query; EF always does the latter and therefore there is no security implications to failing to parameterize a LINQ to Entities query, the only impact is performance related.)

While the potential unlocked with this release is limited, this is the first move in a direction which will unlock many previously unachievable scenarios with the built in providers.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 15, 2013
  Is EF 6.0 beta1 supported with this new public provider concept?

• Anonymous
  May 15, 2013
  Public Data Source Providers... finally!

• Anonymous
  May 18, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2013
  This is great news :) Can't wait the news when you'll say you have integrated it with EF 6.0 !!

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2013
  Thanks you guys, you are doing amazing work here with WCF Data Services, I really appreciate you make  public the built-in providers. I had been making pitfalls loading them through reflection. I have been moving towards some scenaries where a different perspective could be nice. For example I’ve been working around to generate a custom WCF Data Service Provider from one Entity Data Model (it is extended with custom annotations to guide layer code generation). I’ve read your source code to follow your logic, but I discovered many logic that I cannot do myself because it requires access to internal members, for example the custom annotations. I use the EDM on design mode, that means you must create a EDM, annotate it with custom annotations on EF designer and I generate the source code to cover the application architecture logic, but you really don’t have the EDM on runtime.  It means I cannot use the built-in WCF Data Service EF provider, then I use your Reflection Provider.  Of course I dealt too with missing features like enum support. I don’t understand why, at least, you don't generate enum properties based on numeric enum type (byte, int). Is there any problem with this temporal solution? The reflection provider requires one defined type with properties and all steps you know it’s needed. Could the reflection provider do expose members to make fluent and interactive metadata generation? For example: GetResourceType(Type t), GetResourceProperty(PropertyInfo info), it can allow to me use your baseline logic and insert my own information including but not limited to virtual properties and/or associations. I guess I cannot emit the virtual types because on these cases the InstanceType will not be the real type. Regards. PD: If you need I can write more details about my scenary.

• Anonymous
  May 21, 2013
  Being able to use EF 6.0 (prerelease) with the public EF provider would be huge.  If you don't decide to make that possible, could you release the source code for the EF provider?  If this isn't possible, I'll have to migrate everything to Web API OData, since that seems a better long-term approach that implementing my own EF provider from scratch (unfortunately Web API OData is missing features, too).

• Anonymous
  May 22, 2013
  Where can I find samples and information how to use the newly provided public Framework and Reflection data source providers. I see that I can now inherit from your providers, but how to compose the DataService with the custom implementations? Do we need to implement IServiceProvider interface to DataServie<T>? thx

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2013
  are lacking in the grouping. It would be a great option! As well as the normal support FirstOrDefault

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2013
  How to avoid that some EF Code First Properties are visible / published to the OData Model? I'm trying to hide implementation details for localized data fields ( storing the same column in different languages) into the model without letting the dataservice consumer know.. I'm looking for a way to replicate the [NotMapped] behavior of the ReflectionProvider but for the newly EntityFrameworkDataServiceProvider class. Any help is well appriciated

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2013
  Hello I continue generating a custom WCF Data Service so I discovered the following points (I left you a comment here on Tue, May 21 2013 3:51 PM):   1.   The <base address><data service>.svc fails when you specify a property with not public getter with something like null “method” value.   2.   The <base address><data service>.svc works, but <base address><data service>.svc$metadata fails when you specify a property on base ResourceType (ResourceType “A” for example with ResourceProperty named “B”) and inherited by other ResourceType with the same name (ResourceType “B” too, but inheriting from ResourceType “A”). The interesting is a model with similar case was accepted like valid entity data model. The attention I would like you pay here is I knew about the first reading decompiled source code and the second because I tested with Mozilla, but with Internet Explorer I never received the information feedback with verbose options enabled in WCF Data Service. Perhaps it happens because I am failing to configure Fiddler, I just install Fiddler and when I opened Mozilla it informed something about Fiddler add-on, is something missing with IE? I was about a week dealing with this two points. I am just giving you this details and inviting you let me know (me and the community) how can I take more informative errors when I am writing custom WCF Data Service support or consider it if we don’t have many choices now. Regards

• Anonymous
  May 28, 2013
  @Jawilliam This articles shed some light about debugging and digging information. blogs.msdn.com/.../debugging-ado-net-data-services.aspx stackoverflow.com/.../how-does-one-debug-a-wcf-data-service

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2013
  cool stuff, tried it, got the result seen here (last post) social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../67573ffd-bab2-48d2-845b-f2172bd35564 still trying to figure out how to update and delete and keep the parameterexpression. hope this is part ofthe current potential unlock. now that I have seen the performance gain the uri parser is a big yawn.

• Anonymous
  May 30, 2013
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2013
  Can I understand that now I can reuse the reflection provider as metadata provider and provide my own query provider?