I don’t like not knowing how something works, so I just had to dig further into how Astoria services see requests for queries versus Updates, Deletes and Inserts.

In my previous post, I dug into the assembly with reflector and could see that a PUT was used for updates, DELETE for deletes and POST for inserts.

I turned tracing on for the Astoria service and pushed the trace info to a log file. You can see how to do that at the end of this post.

Looking at the messages, you can see the METHOD and the query operators but not the main call. 🙁

For example if I made a call to service.svc/Customers the message looks like this. I’ve stripped out WebHeader information from the message.

I don’t see that I called the Customers “operation”.

If I request service.svc/Customers[52], it’s the same. I don’t see the Customers and I don’t see the ID i’ve passed in.

If I use a query operator as in service.svc/Customers[City eq Seattle], it’s still not exposed. Now I’m getting frustrated. I know I’ll have to dig deeper at some point, or bribe Pablo to show me someday.

But for now here’s a little gratification. If I create my own Service Operation which takes a query string, now there is something to see. My service operation is CustomersbyCity. the call looks like this

service.svc//CustomersByCity?city=London

The message looks like this

When I use my little console app as a client and do some inserting and deleting, I can see the methods coming up the pipe, remember, the Astoria.Client.dll translates the function (insert/update/delete) into a Method.

So, only MILDLY interesting to me (because I can’t get in deep enough yet) and probably COMPLETELY uninteresting to most everyone else. But it was fun digging around and also learning how to use some of the WCF tool. Here by the way is how I got to see the messages.

Modify the web.config to “Turn On” tracing and messaging. You can do it manually or with a tool.

    <system.diagnostics>
        <sources>
            <source name=“System.ServiceModel.MessageLogging”>
                <listeners>
                    <add name=“messages”
                    type=“System.Diagnostics.XmlWriterTraceListener”
                    initializeData=“c:\logs\messages.svclog” />
                </listeners>
            </source>
        </sources>
    </system.diagnostics>

    <system.serviceModel>
        <diagnostics>
            <messageLogging logEntireMessage=“true” logMessagesAtServiceLevel=“true”
               logMessagesAtTransportLevel=“true” />
        </diagnostics>
    </system.serviceModel>

You can use the WCF Config tool in Visual Studio 2008 to configure this. Right click on the web.config and choose Edit WCF Configuration. Here are screenshots of the settings that created the above in my web.config.

If you are using the Web Dev server, you need to stop that server so that the trace actually gets written to the file before you can look at it.

Once the file is created, you can look at it using the Service Trace Viewer which you can find in the SDK Tools (available from Start/Program Files/Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio).

I got bored with querying Astoria in the browser and and wanted to see how to use it in an application, so I opened up the sample console app that comes with the bits and started poking around and was astonished at what I saw.

You can create an new WebDataContext based on the Astoria data service.

WebDataContext is like an ObjectContext. Here’s what it exposes:

namespace Microsoft.Astoria.Client
{
public class WebDataContext : IDisposable
{
public WebDataContext(string uri);

public string BaseUri { get; }
public ICredentials Credentials { get; set; }

public void Add(object obj, string entitySet);
public void Attach(object obj, string entityKey, ObjectState state);
public WebDataQuery<T> CreateQuery<T>(string queryString);
public WebDataQuery<T> CreateQuery<T>(string queryString, QueryOption queryOptions);
public void Delete(object obj);
public string[] GetEntitySets();
public void MarkModified(object obj);
public void SaveChanges();
}
}

So, you can create a WebDataContext

WebDataContext ctx = new WebDataContext(“http://localhost:50000/northwind.svc”);

then query it

Category beverages =
ctx.CreateQuery<Category>(“/Categories[CategoryName eq ‘Beverages’]”)
.FirstOrDefault();

add a new object to the ObjectContext

Of course, you can update and delete, too.

So, I wanted to see what’s going on here. It’s REALLY important to understand that we’re looking at prototype bits. THe production code that they are working on now will be different, though the concepts and use will be relative to what we can play with today.

You can’t get any hints by adding ?WSDL to the end of the uri. Rembmer withi a default asotira service, there are no operations. It’s all based on interpreting the URI. So I opened up Reflector and pointed to the key assembly.

SaveChanges calls a method called SendHttpEntityUpdate which sends up the object and the key and based on the operation calls a request method. So if you are adding, it sends a POST. If you are deleting, it sends DELETE and if you are modifying it sends PUT. The dll used by the service checks which method you pushed up (there’s an enum for ReceiveEntityOperations) and processes the incoming data accordingly.

Neat!

So of course there will be the usual million concerns about this. There are definitely credentials built into these operations and all kinds of ways to limit what is available thorugh the web service.  And there’s so much I don’t know yet, so don’t judge solely on what you are seeing here.

If you don’t have a .NET Astoria client, you can just construct the POST, PUT and DELETE URIs. I can’t say how to do that quite yet though. 😉 (Not that it’s a secret. I just don’t know how yet.)

But it’s still darned cool. Nice job folks (and don’t forget Alex who was key in getting Astoria going before he left Microsoft! )

I find it helpful to use the browser to visualize immediate cause and effect of queries to an Astoria web data service. THere’s so much more that you can do when you are really using this in applications, though.

In the documentation there’s a list of query operators:

• callback (specific to JSON for AJAX calls)
• expand – pull related data using EDM associations
• format – define format of the response (eg xml, json, rdf)
• keyset- only return the entityKeys
• orderby (you know what this is)
• skip (same as in LINQ)
• top

The doc explains each of these in more detail.

Here for example, I can get a specific customer and all of their sales order headers. (Make sure you have MultipleActiveResultSets=true in your connection string in order to do this. That allows the db to return more than one result on the same connection string .. a feature added in that we first acquired with .NET 2.0 and SS2005.)

I can drill even further to return the SalesOrderDetail data form the SalesOrderHeader using this URI:

http://localhost:55976/WebDataService1.svc/Customer[6]?$expand=SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderDetail

Here’s an example of using skip

Looking at the non-xml formats is tough in Internet Explorer, at least with JSON as IE doesn’t know how to display the response. There are a few ways around this.

1) (bit of a hack :-))

Add this into the appSettings seciton of web.config

  <add key=”EnableAstoriaJSONP” value=”true”/>

and then browse your service in Firefox, Firefox will ask you waht you want to view the response in, choose notepad and you can see the json response. Read the caveats about JSONP in the Astoria documentation.

2) Use the helper tool which is an HTML page here [ http://astoria.sandbox.live.com/tools/raw.htm ]. You can’t use this online (I know ’cause I tried in my impatience!). You need to download it and add it into your project. It will then properly parse and display results.

So all this is just about querying, the “R” (read) in CRUD. Wait till you see the C, U & D. Watch for another post.

Here’s a quick start for checking out astoria. See my  blog post “what the heck is astoria” if necessary. 🙂

Requirements:
VS2008 Beta 2
Entity Framework Beta 2
Entity Framework Tools August CTP
Astoria CTP September refresh (which works with VS2008 Beta 2)

Note that I had to do this in XP. I’m having a wierd problem in Vista around the ASPNETCompatibilityEnabled setting in web.config. You can follow the discussion of that if you are interested in this forum thread. The thread is accidentally a combination of Kevin Hoffman’s issues with IIS and my issue with Cassini. They don’t seem to be related problems.

1. Start a new web application project (not website) in VS2008.

2. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model using the projects Add New Item dialog.
If you haven’t used the wizard before, you can see this blog post.
The basic steps are

• Generate from Database
• SElect a database (same as doing this for other data UIs in Visual Studio)
• Just leave default names for things for this quickstart. (I pointed to Northwind in SQL Server and it defaulted at NorthwindModel and NorthwindEntities, etc)
• Select all database objects (this is the default). This brings in tables, sprocs and views.
• Then finish and you will see the EDMX file in the solution. You can double click on that to see the conceptual model (one of three parts of the model) in the designer. Note that this is just a simple way of getting a model from a database, the most basic type of conceptual model.

Add a Web Data Service.
Add New Item, choose Web Data Service. It’s in the main section (Visual Basic/ C#, not categorized into Data or Web templates) down on the bottom, alphabetical. 🙂

The services code view should open up. Note the TODO for the class. All you need to do is replace the stub [class name]

(VB)

(C#)

with the name of your entity wrapper class created in the model. THe model code gens a class file.
 

You can open up the model in teh designer and then see it’s Namespace and Entity Container Name in the properties.
 

That’s it! Now you can browse the web service directly (eg. right click on svc file in solution explorer and View in Browser) and start looking at how the data is exposed through the EDM.

My What the Heck is Astoria post walks through some quick query scenarios to give you an idea of what you can do.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of course. See the Astoria Team blog for more info.

I’ll be doing a session on Astoria at REMIX Boston 07 (10/8-10/9) and at the New England Code Camp (9/29-9/30).

What is Astoria?

Astoria exposes data as web services through an Entity Framework Data Model. Once exposed, you can use URI based syntax to query data through the conceptual layer of the entity data model. You can control what is and isn’t exposed and you can also do inserts, updates and deletes. The results can be output in a number of formats including JSON and ATOM.

It’s simplest to understand this by looking at some queries in a web browser. The Astoria CTP add-in for Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 has a template for creating a Web Data Service that looks like a WCF service. It only needs one class to expose the whole kit n’ caboodle and that class inherits from WebDataService, a generic class. You merely need to tell that class that the type it is dealing with is the Entities class exposed by an Entity Data Model that you have created. The class doesn’t even have any code in it.

  public class northwind : WebDataService<NorthwindModel.NorthwindEntities>
    {
    }

Then you can just make calls to that service and start playing with the query syntax.

The base service exposes the list of entities in the model (http://mysite/myservice.svc). The payload is just a raw XML representation of the data. There will be payloads for different formats, such as JSON, ATOM and more. See this Astoria team blog post for more info.

Then you can start drilling in. Here for example, I have asked for the Categories entities. It will return all entities with their details.

Now you can start seeing the URIs that are displayed to show you how to drill further into data. When looking at it in the browser, you might want to click on those URIs, but remember, in a real app this is not how you will be working with the results of the service call. 🙂 Note that you can see how to get to the related Products data although it is not pulled in automatically. That’s no different than how Entity Framework works by default – deferred loading of related data.

So let’s try the Category uri for categoryID 2.

And then get the products for that category.

So you can see now the basic concept of what Astoria is doing. I am not forced to write a billion operations in my web service to expose my data every which way. I don’t have to deal with building xmldocuments to return data that can be consumed by anyone, not just .NET clients that can deal with serialized datasets. With proper security in place and the possibility of customizing what is and isn’t exposed (and how), consumers of my data can now have easy access to do all kinds of reporting, mash-ups and more. The fact that any consumer will know what to do with any data that is exposed via an astoria web data service is huge.

You can learn more about Astoria by following the Astoria Team blog.

Erick Thompson is at SQL PASS and will be doing a talk on Entity Framework for DBAs tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon.

You can get a preview of what he will be talking about by reading his recent post on the topic.