The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites. In this session we will build out a basic OData feed for the East of Toronto .NET User Group events that will be utilized in our future website. In the coming months we will build upon these services to expose our events in various ways.

1. Implementing OData:
Create a User Group Event Feed
Chris Dufour, ASP MVP
Software Architect, Compuware
chris.dufour@wigets.net
Twitter: chrduf

2. Agenda
 What is “Open Data”?
 What is the “Open Data Protocol”?
 How is any of this useful/interesting?
 Build an OData service
 Consume OData using Jquery and code
behind

3. What is Open Data
“Open Data” is data that is
made available to anyone*,
in a standard, easily
consumable way

4. Why is this useful?
1. Great ideas require great data
2. Data in non-open forms can (and most
likely will) create more friction than good

5. 1. Great ideas require great data
The Top 5 iPhone Apps of 2009 need data…
1. Tweetie 2
2. Yelp
3. Slacker (video streaming)
4. FlightTrack Pro
5. Mint

7. Windows
iPhone
Browser
Windows Phone
Services powering Experiences
Silverlight
Web Site
Web API
webOS

8. 2. Data in non-open forms can (and most
likely will) create more friction than good
“…good data management
can generate good science,
and bad data management
can inhibit the process of
scientific discovery.”
- Ray P. Norris

9. How does this encourage productivity?

10. Why the Web Works
 Simple and open
◦ Addressing scheme – URI
◦ Application protocol – HTTP
◦ Representation Format – (X)HTML
◦ Response codes – HTTP status
 Scales best when
◦ Stateless
◦ Cached
 It works because people find value in it

11. The Web of Services should
work the way the Web of
Pages works

12. OData
 Just HTTP
◦ Data as resources, HTTP methods to
act on it
◦ Leverage caching, proxies,
authentication, …
 Uniform way of representing
structured data
◦ Atom (full AtomPub protocol support), JSON
 Uniform URL conventions
◦ Navigation, filtering, sorting, paging,
etc.
 Uniform operations
◦ Every piece of information is
addressable
◦ GET, POST, PUT, DELETE always
mean the same

13. Expose UG Event Data

14. Resources
 Open data protocol – OData
◦ http://www.odata.org/
 OData Explorer
◦ http://silverlight.net/ODataExplorer/
 LinQPad
◦ http://www.linqpad.net/Beta.aspx
 JSONP and URL-controlled format support
◦ http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DataServicesJSONP
 jQuery Templates plugin (jquery-tmpl)
◦ http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/04/jque
ry-templates-data-link-and-globalization-accepted-as-
official-jquery-plugins.aspx
◦ http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/