AJAX Series Part 2: Moving to the Client – Using jQuery and OData with Third-party Controls

Part two of the webinar series occurred yesterday and, just like with the first one, I wanted to follow up with a blog post answering all of the questions that came up. I also wanted to thank everyone that attended, you guys were great and were very attentive (as I saw after reading the chat logs regarding my initial Eval statement!). Your exact question might not be included here, but that’s just due to a duplicate (or very similar) question. You can find all the answers to the questions below:

• Will this code be made available for download the webinar?
  The code will be available after the conclusion of the series, or part three, which will occur on August 30th at 11 AM EST.

• Will the webinar recordings be placed on Telerik TV?
  Each webinar is recorded and placed on Telerik TV, part one has been available since last week and part two was uploaded earlier today.

• What is a common practice to use: OnNeedDataSource or call DataBind on Page load and then use ajax calls?
  It all depends on your particular scenario, and both scenarios can end up being very similar. If you are doing server-side binding with the RadGrid or RadListView, no matter if it’s through OnNeedDataSource or setting it in Page_Load, the controls will go back to the server when paging/sorting/filtering to grab additional data. So while OnNeedDataSource will be fired when the Datasource property has not been set and any of these commands fire, the same will occur with using the Datasource property in the Page_Load event. To prevent a full postback (which is usually the concern) you could take use of the RadAjax control and all of its sub-controls (RadAjaxPanel, RadAjaxManager etc.). This will also be a topic during the third webinar.

• Is OData different than any standard web service?
  This could be answered as yes and no at the same time. If you simply take use of the regular service references and use only the proxy classes which are generated by the web services you might not necessarily notice a difference. However, the main difference with OData is that it has a huge focus on core web principles, such as an HTTP-based uniform interface for interacting with its objects. As I showed off in the webinar, the great thing about it is that I can very easily generate a string using the OData conventions and have the same string execute a query across JavaScript, in my browser URL window, .NET languages, or even any other platform that you can think of.  For some further insight to this see the links in the question below.

• Where can we find more information about OData?
  The best place is honestly OData.org. Here you can find a full list of Producers and Consumers (including some Telerik Products). What is pretty helpful is that the documentation covers the protocol pretty well, so to get a good understanding of how queries work I definitely recommend reading over that page.

• What version of jQuery are you using?
  In this particular demo I’m using version 1.6.2, but most of the code used in this example does not take use of any new features in 1.6.2, so older versions can be used as well if need be.

• You mentioned partial postbacks for performance gains, will you be covering this?
  This will be covered in the third webinar, so mark your calendar for August 30th :)

Webinar Recording

The second webinar is also now uploaded on Telerik TV. Follow this link to see what we went through in the second webinar. For those of you that have not watched the first webinar, found here on Telerik TV, I recommend that you go watch that first as this webinar builds off of the work we did in the first one.

Important links (in case you just scrolled down ;)):
Part 1 on Telerik TV
Part 2 on Telerik TV
Webinar Registration Link