WCF Data Services and Web API with OData; choices, choices.

by Matt Milner 2. April 2013 15:13

Back in 2010, I wrote a course for Pluralsight on OData which covers the protocol in general and introduces the viewer to the client and server programming model. This year, Microsoft released updates to the ASP.NET Web API which includes support for OData in the controllers.  Since this latest release, I’ve received several questions about the differences between these two toolsets for building services that support OData and some guidance on which to use.  This is my attempt to answer those queries. 

 

OData

OData is a protocol developed by Microsoft and others for data access using web protocols such as HTTP, ATOMPub and JSON. One of the benefits of OData is a consistent query experience, defined in the protocol, that enables rich querying using URI query string parameters. This consistent query syntax, much like ANSI SQL, provides a platform neutral API for working with data.

This means I might be able to write a query like this:

http://pluralsight.com/odata/Categories?$filter=Name eq 'OData' 

 

There are a variety of query string options you can use to filter and identify the resource(s) you want to read or update. I can use this same pattern to apply filters to other OData services using their entity properties.

 

WCF Data Services

WCF Data Services is Microsoft’s library for building OData Services  or writing OData clients.  On the server side, the framework provides a very quick, simple model for exposing all or part of an Entity Framework model as an OData compatible service with little or no code. This service, scaffolded in minutes supports, if configured to allow it, read, insert, update and delete. 

If you don’t have an Entity Framework model, you can expose a simple .NET object with IQueryable properties for read only access, or implement the IUpdateable interface and support update, insert and delete on any collection. 

This framework provides the quickest way to get a service up and running when the data model is the primary focus of your application. You do have the ability to extend the service with functions that are exposed over the HTTP API as well. For example, at Pluralsight we could have a method to return the top 10 courses. This might be a convenience to save the client from having to compute this themselves, or it might be because the data needed to make that distinction isn’t exposed in the data available in the service therefore the client couldn’t compute or filter to get those same results. 

On the client side, the WCF Data Services library provides a .NET interface over the OData protocol and exposes the query semantics as a LINQ provider.  This enables .NET developers to access the data in an OData service as they would any other data source.

Microsoft has been moving some OData features into the OData Library to enable reuse in many different scenarios.  This means you don’t have to accept the default WCF Data Services model, especially if you don’t have an EDM for your data source. 

You can, obviously, use the client and service independently.  That is, even if you develop your service using another framework, perhaps not even Microsoft, you can use the client library to access it.

 

ASP.NET Web API

The ASP.NET web API was introduced last year as a framework for building HTTP services; that is services that expose their functionality over HTTP (these may or may not be REST services). You build these services using controllers, much like ASP.NET MVC development for web applications.  The services are most often focused on exposing certain resources and enabling various actions on those resources.

One of the features of ASP.NET Web API is content negotiation. This enables a client to request a resource, a Course for example, and indicate (using the HTTP accept header) they would like the response in JSON, XML, or any other format. If the server can support the response type, it does so, serializing the data appropriately. 

It is only natural that customers would want OData JSON or ATOMPub as a format for exposing their resources, and would request support for the query syntax. The beauty of OData is that you don’t have to write umpteen methods for querying (GetCustomer, GetCustomersByCity, GetCustomersByRegion, etc.). So, using pieces of OData Lib, the Web API team enabled support of OData query syntax on an API controller method and enabling update semantics as well. 

 

Making the decision

Having said all that, I would summarize as follows: WCF Data Services focuses on the data model and limits code, while Web API focuses on the controller/code and enables the formatting and query syntax of OData.

So, if you are looking to expose a data model (EDM or otherwise) quickly and don’t need a lot of code or business logic, WCF Data Services makes that REALLY easy and would be a good starting point. 

If, however, you are building an API and simply want to expose some resources using either OData query syntax or formatting, then ASP.NET Web API is probably the best place to start. 

I hope this is helpful and have fun writing your services no matter what toolset you choose.

Tags:

ASP.Net | WebAPI | Windows Communication Foundation | OData