Telerik Data Services Wizard Walk Through

Last week Telerik released the December CTP of the Data Services Wizard. I posted on my blog a video that shows how to get started, however, for those of you that like walkthroughs better, here is one using a WCF Data Services (Astoria) service.

Getting Started: Mapping Data With OpenAccess

To get started, first download and install the Data Services Wizard. After that, fire up Visual Studio and create a new Class library application named Telerik.DSW.Demo.Astoria.DAL. Run the OpenAccess “Enable Project to use ORM” wizard and then run the Reverse Mapping Wizard and map to your database. For this demo I mapped the Northwind database.

Map as many tables as you like, you can also manually remove the complex properties (Customer Collection from the Order entity for example) via the mapping wizard if you want to use that entity in your service. (Don’t worry we will have a solution for this when we have our January beta!)

Note: your wizard may not have created the ObjectScopeProvider in your DAL project. If you don’t have one in your DAL project via the main menu choose Telerik|Open Access|Configuration|Connection Strings. Then select the ObjectScopeProvider check box showed in the dialog below and click on ok.

Next Up: Using the Wizard

The WCF Data Service that the wizard will create has to reside in another (Web) project. So let’s create a Web project named Telerik.DSW.Demo.Astoria.Web.

Now it is time to start the wizard. Just select from the main menu Telerik|Data Services Wizard.

This will bring up the first page of the wizard, Select DAL Project. Here you select the name of the project that has your OpenAccess entities. Select the DAL project and click Next.

The Select Data Service screen is where you have to enter in some important information.

First put in the namespace, this is the namespace of your web project. (Future versions of the wizard will default to this namespace), and the name of your service, I choose Northwind as my creative service name. Also select which entities to generate as part of your service. I choose Customer, Order, and OrderDetail. Lastly, select which type of Service to create, in this case a WCF Data Service (our wizard did not catch up with the name, so you have to select ADO.NET Data Service (Astoria).)

After you click next, you can preview the generated code on the View Output screen.

Click next and then you will be asked to choose which project to add the service to on the Finish screen. Select the web project, or Telerik.DSW.Demo.Astoria.Web and click next.

Now the wizard does a lot of work for you.

First it sets a reference to all of the WCF Data Services libraries (System.Data.Services and System.Data.Services.Client.) Next it sets a reference to the DAL project for you (in our case Telerik.DSW.Demo.Astoria.DAL) and also sets a reference to the Telerik OpenAccess DLLs for you (Telerik.OpenAccess and Telerik.OpenAccess.Query.) Lastly, the wizard created the Northwind.cs OpenAccess reference file as well as the actual data service (svc and cs) files.

The last step is to run the service. Just right click on the SVC file and choose View in Browser from the context menu. You will see your RESTful service come up in the browser. From here you can set up a client to consume the service in ASP.net, Silverlight, or any other Microsoft and non-Microsoft technology.

Enjoy!