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The Open Data Protocol, also known as OData recently has gained a lot of popularity. That is why we decided to demonstrate how to connect and consume an existing OData feed from Telerik Reporting with the help of WCF Data Services. For the sake of this example we will connect to the Northwind sample database exposed as an OData service with the following root URL:

http://services.odata.org/Northwind/Northwind.svc.

Let's start by adding a service reference to the Northwind data service to our report class library - we use the above service URL for this purpose:

add service reference


Visual Studio creates a reference to the service in your project and generates automatically a DataServiceContext and an entity model for accessing the exposed data. The DataServiceContext class is called NorthwindEntities by default and defines properties for querying the entities from the Northwind database.

Next we define a query to retrieve some data for the report - for the sake of this example, we should retrieve information about the products by category. To do this add a new class NorthwindDataAccess to the project and define the following method:

C#

public class NorthwindDataAccess
{
    public IEnumerable<Products_by_Category> GetProductsByCategory(string categoryName)
    {
        var serviceRoot = new Uri("http://services.odata.org/Northwind/Northwind.svc");
        var serviceContext = new NorthwindEntities(serviceRoot);
        var productQuery = from product in serviceContext.Products_by_Categories
                           where product.CategoryName.StartsWith(categoryName)
                           select product;
 
        return productQuery.ToArray();
    }
}

 

VB.NET

Public Class NorthwindDataAccess
    Function GetProductsByCategory(ByVal categoryName As String) As IEnumerable(Of Products_by_Category)
        Dim serviceRoot = New Uri("http://services.odata.org/Northwind/Northwind.svc")
        Dim serviceContext = New NorthwindEntities(serviceRoot)
        Dim productQuery = From product In serviceContext.Products_by_Categories _
                           Where product.CategoryName.StartsWith(categoryName) _
                           Select product
 
        Return productQuery.ToArray()
    End Function
End Class

 

Finally create a new report and use the ObjectDataSource component to bind to the NorthwindDataAccess.GetProductsByCategory method as a data source for the report.

As you can see, connecting a Telerik Report to OData feed is straightforward and executed in a seamless manner using the powerful Telerik Reporting's data source components without breaking the best architecture patterns in a few simple steps. The video below shows these short steps in action.



 

The video is also available in Telerik TV: Connecting Telerik Reports to OData Feeds

For more information about the OData protocol and WCF Data Services you can visit the following useful links:


About the Author

Stefan Tsokev

Stefan’s main interests outside the .NET domain include rock music, playing the guitar and swimming.

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