The next trick in Add OpenAccess Service Wizard sleeve - Web API

Telerik OpenAccess ORM Q2 2012 is already live so hurry up and check all the benefits of upgrading to it on our What’s New page! 

One of the most interesting additions to this release is the Add OpenAccess Service wizard (in short AOS wizard), a great time-saver when you want to expose your data to other tiers using various kinds of services. After implementing the generation of WCF Data Services 5 there, we would like to share with you our future plans for this wizard – Web API support!

Goals

As many of you know Microsoft recently published a release candidate version of the new WebAPI with the MVC 4 RC. We think it is the perfect moment to add one more service layer technology to the broad array of service types generated by AOS wizard.
As with the other service scaffolds, the main goal is to let developers hit the ground running with a new service implementation. That means we need to expose endpoints for each entity, and related methods for creating, updating and deleting them. In the case of WebAPI, we will also need to configure service routes in the global.asax.

Challenges

The WebAPI framework makes it easier for developers to create and configure a service layer for any application, but some of the same challenges must still be faced. In particular, how do you best expose your data at the service boundary?

In a well-designed data model, entities have many relationships which can wreak havoc on a JSON or XML serializer. To get around these issues the Add OpenAccess Service Wizard creates repositories and DTOs for each entity. While we believe separating the data layer and the transport layer is a good thing, we consider allowing the developers to make that decision based on their specific needs. We will provide an option for that.

As always, the AOS wizard will generate the service end points using T4 templates, which can easily be customized. That said, we hope that by starting the conversation early we can make the default functionality robust enough that most developers will not have to customize anything :)

Conclusions

In the end it is YOUR feedback that matters most!

What would you like to see the Data Service Wizard scaffold for WebAPI out of the box?

Are you going to replace any of your existing WCF services with WebAPI?

Would you like to see navigation properties support in our DTO types in the WebAPI service layer?