How to populate a Lightswitch screen from exterior restful service?

Question

The general question is this: in Lightswitch can a create a screen that interacts with an exterior service via restful posts and populates itself with the data returned?

Here are the specifics of the situation I'm running into: I have a fairly large set of data (1000000+ entries) in a SQL database that I need to make real-time searchable (<100ms response times) with some fairly powerful search requirements (highlighting matches within text, handling misspellings in the query, etc.). Lightswitch and Entity Framework can't handle that on their own from what I've seen.

I've set up an ElasticSearch server instance on Azure Cloud that meets those requirements. I've written a wrapper service to handle the actual interaction with ElasticSearch, also residing on Azure Cloud.

But I can't seem to figure out how to get a LightSwitch application to interact with it. I looked into the build in solutions, like exposing the data with OData, or RIA services, but all those seem to do is get the data to LightSwitch via Entity Framework and then LightSwitch performs the searches with Entity, which I've already established doesn't fit my needs. I'm not really sure where to go from here.

What would be the best way to pull this off. Am I missing something about data services? Should I be looking into custom controls more heavily, or is that just going to be another dead end?

Eventually I would also like it to search in real-time as queries are typed. Is that something LightSwitch can handle?

Answer 1

Have you try posting in lightswitch forum? https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/home?forum=lightswitch