Book Image

OData Programming Cookbook for .NET Developers

By : Juntao Cheng
Book Image

OData Programming Cookbook for .NET Developers

By: Juntao Cheng

Overview of this book

Odata (Open Data Protocol) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData enables data access among a variety of applications, services, and stores by adopting existing Web technologies such as HTTP, XML, and JSON. This book deals with common OData programming cases over the Microsoft .NET Framework platform and eases the learning curve for a .NET developer to start incorporating OData in data service development.This book provides a collection of recipes that help .NET developers to get familiar with OData programming in a quick and efficient manner. The recipes cover most OData features from the former ADO.NET Data Service to the current WCF Data Service platform. In addition, all the sample cases here are based on real-world scenarios and issues that .NET developers might come across when programming with OData in application development.This book will be your handy guide with basic to advanced walkthroughs of common OData programming cases for the Microsoft .NET Framework platform. You will learn quick solutions to necessary tasks to integrate the power of OData at both server-side and client-side.This book will help you master the use of OData with .NET Framework by taking you through hands-on and practical recipes. It starts by talking about the common means for building OData services and consuming OData services in client applications. Then, some more specific topics like hosting, configuration and security are discussed. The book also covers many popular and interesting topics such as integrating OData in web applications, and developing data-driven mobile applications with OData. Moreover, you can also find quite a few recipes discussing real-world OData producers and new features in latest and future versions.Within "OData Programming Cookbook for .NET Developers", all the recipes are selected based on real-world scenarios that you will commonly come across. Each recipe covers a specific topic, going from the description of the problem, through a conceptual solution, to a solution containing sample code. By following these recipes, you can acquire how to program with OData in a simple, effective, and easy manner.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OData Programming Cookbook for .NET Developers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Using MSXML to consume OData service in unmanaged applications


We have discussed quite a few examples of consuming an OData service in .NET managed applications (including Console, Windows Form, and WPF). Though this book is targeting .NET developers, I would still like to take a chance to introduce OData service accessing in unmanaged client applications (at least, the server side is still implemented through .NET WCF Data Service).

In this recipe, we will show you how to play with an OData service in an Microsoft Excel client through VBA code.

Getting ready

For demonstration purposes, we will create an Excel 2010 workbook, which uses VBA code to retrieve and display the entity objects from the Categories and Products entity sets (of the Northwind OData service). The following is how the main UI of the sample Excel workbook appears:

The source code for this recipe can be found in the \ch02\ODataNativeClientSln\ directory.

How to do it...

The following are the steps for creating the sample Excel...