WCF Data Services how to create simple service methods

Question

I have a WCF Data service which uses the reflection provider to expose a data context. Now I need to implement some simple service methods (There are all actions. They don't have return values). I did some research with Google and also found a lot of posts. But I never found something like an default implementation for the IDataServiceActionProvider which for example works with attributes or something like this.

Now the question: Do I really need to implement the IDataServiceActionProvider by my own or is there something like ReflectionDataServiceActionProvider?

Answer 1

This is probably not answer you want to hear, but I'm not aware of a default implementation of IDataServiceActionProvider.

You might want to take a look into creating your OData service using Web API instead of WCF Data Services; from my understanding, creating actions is much easier with Web API.

Some quick sample code taken from Alex's blog post to demonstrate the simplicity:

ActionConfiguration pullWheelie = modelBuilder.Entity<Motorcycle>().Action(“PullWheelie”); 
pullWheelie.Parameter<int>(“ForSeconds”); 
pullWheelie.Returns<bool>();

Alternatively, instead of creating an OData action, you could use WCF Data Services to create a "Service Operation" which is somewhat of a legacy actions/functions capability of OData. It's pretty easy to create one of these with WCF Data Services, but be aware that they'll be disappearing completely in OData v4. To create a service operation, you just need to create a method in your data source and annotate it with the WebGet or WebInvoke attribute. Once you configure the permissions for accessing the method in InitializeService, your method will be invokable by clients. For details, see this documentation.