Introduction

Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for querying and updating data, which can be freely incorporated in various kinds of data access applications. OData makes itself quite simple and flexible to use by applying and building upon existing well-defined technologies, such as HTTP, XML, AtomPub, and JSON.

WCF Data Service is the main component for building OData service on .NET Framework platform. WCF Data Service supports exposing various data source models such as ADO.NET Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, and CLR Objects through OData service endpoints. Also, we're not limited to these existing data models, we can build our own custom Data Service Provider or convert other services (such as WCF RIA service) to OData service. In this chapter, we will demonstrate several cases of using WCF Data Service to build OData services that can deal with different kinds of data source models.