Substituting Astoria Payload?

Question

I'd love to use data services to publish read only data over http.

What I'd really like is the ability to provide different shaped bits of xml that represent whats in my db using filters, expand etc.

What I don't really like is the 'goop' in atom, I know that json is a bit lighter but what I'd really like to do is whack in my own serialisation strategy.

Originally i thought they had a few more formats, I thought it's be easily extensible... but i can't find anything on it.

Am I looking in the wrong place? Am I barking up the wrong tree all together?

thanks

Answer 1

yep, yep, i agree.

have even looking at the 'web programming model' quite hard as it does seem to offer more flexibility.

essentially i'd like to

• recieve uri + query
• map uri to entity/record
• return pox including links as per query

its the including linked entities which is getting me at the moment. data services allow you to 'walk the graph' using the expand function but i can't find an easy way to substitute that functionality.

with a rest service, would i have to manually parse an 'expand path' and load appropriate entities into an object graph before serialising them?

thanks for your help!

Answer 2

Data services is designed for a particular problem, it's not a generic POX over REST implementation, and I'm not sure trying to bend it that way is the way to go.

It's quite straightforward to "roll your own" REST/POX service with WCF (article here), which might be a better starting point if you are deviating from data services too much.