WCF Data Services Feature Suggestions

Welcome to the WCF Data Services feature suggestion list. Find out more information about Data Services at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data .

If you have questions, need help or find a bug in Data Services, visit the forums at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/adodotnetdataservices/threads

WCF Data Services Feature Suggestions

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  1. Support Enums as Property Types on Entities

    have a type on the server that is defined by an Enum with a restricted set of values, I want to be able to expose that through my model and through my data service

    859 votes
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      1 comment  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
    • Auto generate methods on the client to call service operations

      I have a service operation defined on my service that is exposed via the metadata. When I use the Add Service Reference gesture to create client proxy code, the proxy code should include methods that call those service operations (for instance, if I have a service operation with the signature "IQueryable<Customer> GetCustomerByCity(string city)", I should have a corresponding client method that calls that service operation and materialized the result

      423 votes
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        6 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
      • Better Validation Support

        Allow me to attribute the model or server side types with validation attributes. Those attributes should then we in the metadata description of the service and code gen'd onto the client types.

        When I work with a service those validation attributes should be applied automatically and I should be notified when a validation failure occurs

        366 votes
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          3 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
        • Allow me to expose entities from multiple sources

          A lot of the data for my OData serivce comes from my database, but I also have a need to have some of the entities in my service come from another data source (example: an existing web service)

          299 votes
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            7 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
          • 240 votes
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              5 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
            • Support for OData Binary Serialization Format

              Provide support for a third wire format (other than JSON/ATOM) that is a binary format.

              236 votes
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                3 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
              • 210 votes
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                  9 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                • Support Type Inheritance in Complex Types

                  Type inheritance is a "must have" if you want to facilitate the adoption of OData on current object oriented frameworks.

                  As V3 will fully support Entity Type inheritance, why not extending it also for complex types, as the CSDL Format spec already states?

                  205 votes
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                    2 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                  • add $format=json support in query URL

                    Now WCF data service supports getting json-formatted response by specifying Accept=application/json header in request only. However, It does not support $format=json as a query option, although it could be circumvented by copying code from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DataServicesJSONP and decorating service class with [JSONPSupportBehavior]. The lack of its support is a well-known issue. Hopefully it can be fixed soon and save people hassles of copying extra code and compiling and publishing.

                    173 votes
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                      5 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                    • DataServiceCollection Mock/Stub support

                      Allow for the mocking / stubbing of the DataServiceCollection and context. All the constructors are internal. It would be nice if they all had interfaces that could be easily stubbed out.

                      172 votes
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                        5 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                      • Annotations

                        Allow me to add annotations to my OData model (Range, Display Member, etc) and have those be picked up by the client code generator. The annotations should be exposed by the service's metadata endpoint for any client to consume if needed.

                        157 votes
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                          4 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                        • Support Containment / Hierarchical Models in OData

                          If I have a schema that has Orders and OrderDetails, I dont want /OrderDetails to be direclty accessible. I only want it to be readable through its parent: /Orders(1)/OrderDetails. Basically what was discussed on the astoria blog a while ago:
                          http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2007/12/21/design-notes-uri-containment-in-astoria.aspx

                          149 votes
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                            0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                          • OData consumable in Excel 2007

                            By looking at the condition of the global economy, I believe there'll be some resistance to upgrade to Office 2010 when it'll be released. oData works great but it only intended to work on Excel 2010 and not Excel 2007. Can Microsoft make the oData consumable by Excel 2007? This will be HUGE for the LOB applications.

                            127 votes
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                              1 comment  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                            • Caching

                              make HTTP and output caching easy to setup in WCF Data Services

                              126 votes
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                                0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                              • 110 votes
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                                  3 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                • Add more extensibility points to give query interceptors more control over what they're intercepting

                                  Not sure if there is already some other mechanism in place for this... ...but it would be neat if it was possible to intercept whatever the dataservice framework adds to IQueryables exposed by data services before enumerating them. If a filter, sort, paging or something else is added server side or as a result of a user request I may want to apply additional rules and/or change how this is added to the query. Especially on IQueryables with large underlying sets of data and/or a complex base query it can be important to be able to control filters and sorting…

                                  97 votes
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                                    1 comment  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                  • Support batch updates with entities that have a MediaEntry (Stream)

                                    The WCF DS Client currently does not support batch updates with entities that have the MediaEntry attriute (IsMediaLinkEntry=true). This makes it impossible to have Streams/Blobs/Documents being part of a transaction by using Context.SaveChanges(SaveChangesOptions.Batch).

                                    It would be nice to have this supported out-of-the-box by the WCF DS Client.

                                    The issue has been discussed here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/adodotnetdataservices/thread/26387eb6-0798-46a2-9010-8ead84b38144

                                    84 votes
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                                      0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                    • 80 votes
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                                        4 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                      • Aggregates

                                        Title says it all

                                        67 votes
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                                          3 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                        • More flexible approach to implementing business logic

                                          The current use of query and change interceptors is good for simple business logic to filter out results etc, but for more complex business logic you can end up exposing a custom service operation. I would like to see more control over wiring in business logic into data service calls.

                                          60 votes
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                                            1 comment  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
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                                          WCF Data Services Feature Suggestions

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