OData with WCF Data Services / Entity Framework

Question

Apologies in advance, this is a long question.

(TL;DR : Does anyone have any advice on using the EF with dynamic fields exposed using WCF Data Services/OData)

I am having some conceptual problems with WCF Data Services and EF, specifically pertaining to exposing some data as an OData service.

Basically my issue is this. The database I am exposing allows users to add fields dynamically (user-defined fields) and it uses a system whereby these fields are added directly to the underlying SQL tables. Furthermore, when you want to add data to the tables you cannot use direct SQL, you have to go via an API that they provide. (it's SAP Business One, fwiw).

I have already sucessfully built a system that exposes various objects via XML and allows a client to update or add new entities into SBO by sending in XML messages, and although it works well it's not really suited to mobile apps as it's very XML-heavy and the entry point is an old-skool asmx webservice. I want to try to jazz it up for mobile development and use Odata with WCF or Web API. (I know I could change up to a WCF service, allow handing of JSON-format requests, and start returning JSON data, but it just seems like there must be a more...native...way)

Initially I had discounted the possibility of using the EF for this because a)Dynamic fields and b)the EF could only be read-only; adding/updating entities would have to be intercepted and routed to the SBO DI Server. However, I am coming back to thinking about it and am looking for some advice (negative or otherwise!) on how to approach.

What I basically want to do is this

• Expose the base tables from SBO (which don't change except when they themselves issue a patch) as EF Entities, with all the usual relationy goodness. In fact I actually will not be directly exposing the tables, I will use a set of filtered SQL Views as the data sources as this ties in with various other stuff we do to allow exposing only certain data to 3rd parties.

• Expose any UDFs a particular user has added as some kind of EAV sub-collection per entity.

• Intercept any requests to ADD or UPDATE an object, and route these through an existing engine I have for interfacing with the SAP Data import services.

I suppose my main question is this; suppose I implement an EF entity representing a Sales Order which comprises a Header and Details collection. To each of these classes I stick in an EAV type collection of user-defined fields and values. How much work is involved in allowing the OData filtering system to work directly on the EAV colleciton (e.g for a client to be able to ask for Service/Orders/$filter=SomeUdfField eq SomeValue where this request has to be passed down into the EAV collection of the Order header entity)

Or is it possible, for example, to generate an EF Model from some kind of metadata on the fly (I don't mind how - code generation or model building library) that would mean I could just expose each entity, dyanmic fields included, as a proper EF Model? Many thanks in advance if you read this far :)

Answer 1

For basic crud to an existing EF context, WCF Data Services works out great. As soon as you want to add some custom functionality, as you described above it takes a bit more work.

What you described is possible, but you would need to build out your own custom data provider to handle the dynamic generation of metadata as well as custom hooks into add/update/delete.

It may be worth looking into WCF Data Services Toolkit, it's a custom provider which slaps a repository pattern over WCF Data Services for ease of use, but it does not provide the custom metadata generation.