Take the shortcut to web services in Q2’12 with the Add OpenAccess Service wizard

Automated code generation for various kinds of services is nothing new for OpenAccess ORM. For years now the Data Service Wizard has been a part of the product. A  tool capable of easily exposing your data to client applications using web services, without having to write a single line of code.

Now we are introducing the new and improved wizard called Add OpenAccess Service. It has been available under the "Generate OpenAccess Domain Model Service..." command as a preview. We took the time to polish the user interface and implement a lot of your feature requests, so we can now proudly present it's first official version.

As we are always trying to give you different options to choose from, we have implemented code generation functionality for several different service types. Let's have a look at some of them:

WCF Data Services

With the Add OpenAccess Service wizard you can use all the official releases of the oData protocol - v.1, v.2 and v.3. We have implemented a custom OpenAccess service provider to expose the persistent classes you select from the OpenAccess context. In addition, you can easily extent the generated code using partial classes to define the Service Operations you would like to have.

WCF Plain Services

When you want to achieve a full blown implementation of a web service, there is a lot of manual coding involved in order to transport the data, implement the CRUD operations for each of your persistent classes, work with object identities, etc. You don't have to worry about that anymore! When you create an WCF Plain Service, AtomPub or RESTfull Collections Service, you will find that the wizard is generating an entire DTO layer of abstraction (including Repositories, Assemblers and Domain Services) used for transporting your data. It is designed to be highly decoupled, and you can easily extend it when necessary.

As the Add OpenAccess Service wizard will be live soon, we are open to your questions, recommendations and general feedback, as we strive to improve all our components to save you time and jump-start your development even in complex N-Tier scenarios. Stay tuned and find out what other surprises we have prepared for the upcoming release!