WCF Data Services Protocol Implementation Details
OData Protocol Implementation Details
The Open Data Protocol (OData) requires that a data service that implements the protocol provide a certain minimum set of functionalities. These functionalities are described in the protocol documents in terms of “should” and “must.” Other optional functionality is described in terms of “may.” This topic describes these optional functionalities that are not currently implemented by WCF Data Services. For more information, see OData Protocol Documentation.
Support for the $format Query Option
The OData protocol supports both JavaScript Notation (JSON) and Atom feeds, and OData provides the $format system query option to allow a client to request the format of the response feed. This system query option, if supported by the data service, must override the value of the Accept header of the request. WCF Data Services supports returning both JSON and Atom feeds. However, the default implementation does not support the $format query option and uses only the value of the Accept header to determine the format of the response. There are cases when your data service may need to support the $format query option, such as when clients cannot set the Accept header. To support these scenarios, you must extend your data service to handle this option in the URI. You can add this functionality to your data service by downloading the JSONP and URL-controlled format support for ADO.NET Data Services sample project from the MSDN Code Gallery web site and adding it to your data service project. This sample removes the $format query option and changes the Accept header to application/json. When you include the sample project and adding the JSONPSupportBehaviorAttribute to your data service class enables the service to handle the $format query option $format=json. Further customization of this sample project is required to also handle $format=atom or other custom formats.
WCF Data Services Behaviors
The following WCF Data Services behaviors are not explicitly defined by the OData protocol:
Default Sorting Behavior
When a query request that is sent to the data service includes a $top or $skip system query option and does not include the $orderby system query option, the returned feed is sorted by the key properties, in ascending order. This is because ordering is required to ensure the correct paging of results. To do this, the data service adds an ordering expression to the query. This behavior also occurs when server-driven paging is enabled in the data service. For more information, see Configuring the Data Service (WCF Data Services).To control the ordering of the returned feed, you should include $orderby in the query URI.