Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Refreshed REST library for SQL Data Services

I finally got around to doing a quick refresh on the SSDS REST Library. It should now be called SDS REST library of course, but I doubt I will change the name as that would break the URL in Code Gallery.

I am calling this one a 'Refresh' release because I am not adding any features. The purpose of this release was to fix the serialization such that it runs in partial trust. Partial trust support is desirable because that means you can use this library in Windows Azure projects.

I found out an interesting fact while working on this about the XmlSerializer. First, serializing a generic type, in this case SsdsEntity<T> works just fine in partial trust. However, deserializing that exact same type will not work without Full trust. To fix it, I had to actually remove any and all code that tried to do it. Instead, I deserialized the T in SsdsEntity<T> and manually created the SsdsEntity part. You can see those updates in the SsdsEntitySerializer class as well as the SsdsEntity<T> Attributes property in the setter if you check. I don't see any problems with my solution, and in fact, it may end up being more efficient.

Remaining work to do: implement the JOIN, OrderBy, and TOP operations (if I find the time).

Get it here: SDS REST Library