Design Notes

JSON Light Sample Payloads

DB Blogs April 17, 2012 Apr 17, 2012 04/17/12

We recently put together a document that contains some of our thinking about JSON light as well as a whole slew of sample payloads. We would love to hear any feedback you have on the format; you can comment in the accompanying OneNote. We will be accepting public feedback on JSON light until May 4, 2012. We will also provide a preview release...

Relationship links

DB Blogs April 5, 2010 Apr 5, 2010 04/5/10

Problem Statement OData (the protocol used by WCF Data Services) enables you to address the relationships between Entries. This functionality is required to be able to create or change a relationship between two instances, such as an Order_Detail that is related to a given Order. Currently the OData protocol requires clients and servers to ...

Design Notes: Row Count

DB Blogs December 15, 2008 Dec 15, 2008 12/15/08

One of the scenarios we have heard feedback around is the ability for the a client of a data service to determine the total number of entities in a set without having to retrieve them all. The following video discusses this scenario in more detail and some of our thoughts regarding how to make the experience better. Astoria ...

Alpha preview of Project Codename "Astoria Offline" coming soon

DB Blogs November 3, 2008 Nov 3, 2008 11/3/08

As we already discussed in a previous blog post, one of the problem spaces related to data services we’d like to take on is synchronization-capable services, enabling offline scenarios. We’re still in the early stages of the project, where direction can be adjusted and good feedback can be very influential. Giving good feedback ...

Astoria futures: offline-enabled data services

DB Blogs October 22, 2008 Oct 22, 2008 10/22/08

We mentioned that we were doing some early thinking of “Astoria Offline” back in Mix 2008, where we even demo’ed an early proof of concept. Now we’ve been working on various design aspects of Data Services for its future versions, and synchronization/offline support is one of them. It’s still an experimental thing...

Making Feeds Friendly

DB Blogs September 28, 2008 Sep 28, 2008 09/28/08

The goal of Astoria in V1 is to easily expose a data source using the REST approach to the web (with support for concurrency, versioning, auth, etc). In general, the way we think about serialization formats (ie. how we represent entites on the wire) is that they are a tool and an application will select the best tool (ie. serialization ...

Merge vs. Replace Semantics for Update Operations

DB Blogs May 20, 2008 May 20, 2008 05/20/08

So far Astoria has used “merge” semantics for update. That is, an “update” operation (an HTTP PUT request) replaces the values of the properties for the target entity that are specified in the input payload; this applies both to properties and links. If a property or link is not present in a PUT operation, it means “leave it with its...

Optimistic Concurrency & Data Services

DB Blogs April 22, 2008 Apr 22, 2008 04/22/08

Different applications have different requirements around consistency and how concurrent modifications are handled. I’ll oversimplify and put all these applications in two buckets: either you care about controlling concurrent changes or you don’t. If you’re creating a REST interface to your data and don’t care about concurrency (e.g. ...

IUpdatable & ADO.NET Data Services Framework

DB Blogs April 10, 2008 Apr 10, 2008 04/10/08

Astoria service allows reading/querying of data via the already-established IQueryable interface – this helps in abstracting Astoria from the underlying data source. But there is no existing interface for the update operations (CUD – create, update, delete operations). Hence we came up with IUpdatable interface to support CUD operations ...

Batching Data Service Requests

DB Blogs April 7, 2008 Apr 7, 2008 04/7/08

We have received a fair amount of feedback regarding a number of use cases where it would be beneficial to enable a client of a data service to “batch” up a group of operations and send them to the data service in a single HTTP request. This reduces the number of roundtrips to the data service for apps that need to make numerous ...

OData

Design Notes - OData