Mehul Harry's DevExpress Blog

Check out this OData and XPO (our ORM) CodePlex project below.

What is OData?

First, a short explanation of the Open Data Protocol as described by the odata.org website:

There is a vast amount of data available today and data is now being collected and stored at a rate never seen before. Much, if not most, of this data however is locked into specific applications or formats and difficult to access or to integrate into new uses. 

Open Data Protocol (OData) 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 does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol(AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years.  OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites.

OData is consistent with the way the Web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web).   This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.

OData is released under the Open Specification Promise to allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.

Learn more here:  odata.org

Watch Scott Hanselman's "OData Basics" video to get a great overview.

The XPO Toolkit

If you use eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) then here’s where it gets fun. There is a free toolkit that allows you to expose your data as an OData feed with just a few lines of code.

Check out the related blog articles on it so far:

• OData Provider for XPO – Introduction
• OData Provider for XPO - IDataServiceMetadataProvider & IDataServiceQueryProvider
• OData Provider for XPO - Client Side
• OData Provider for XPO - Complex Types
• OData Provider for XPO - !summary
• OData Provider for XPO - GroupBy(), Count(), Max() and More...
• OData Provider for XPO - Using Server Mode to handle Huge Datasets
• End User Report Designer – Publishing Reports (Part 1)
• End User Report Designer – Viewing Reports (Part 2)

Download From CodePlex

Download the project source code and samples here:  eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) Toolkit

Samples:

• Calendar - Example shows how to create an OData feed and consume it using a Scheduler Control
• Channel - Example shows how to create a Video feed application in Silverlight

Watch Video Webinar

Watch the video of the Introduction to OData webinar to learn about OData and WinForms Scheduler data binding:

Azret Botash is our resident OData guru and he'd love to hear from you about anything and everything related to OData.

Try the OData XPO Toolkit and then drop me a line below with your thoughts. Thanks.

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