MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

When you first start kicking the tires on ADO.NET Data Services you might try hitting the URL in Internet Explorer to see if it works.  In fact it's kind of interesting to try to play with the various syntax of what you can pass to see how they work.

For example, just hitting the URL of the Data Service and you will see something like the following that shows what tables are exposed.

You can drill down further by trying to get data for one of tables (or entities since I'm feeding this from an Entity Framework model). 

By adding "/Address(1)" on the URL, I indicate I want to retrieve the address with a key of 1.

You might get hung up here, because by default IE tries to read the response and thinks it should be a valid Atom or RSS feed and you will see something like the following

After you get done scratching your head trying to figure out why it says "Internet Explorer cannot display this feed"  - let me explain how to get that to work.  If you go to Tools -> Internet Options.  The select the Content tab. Near the bottom click on the Settings next to the Feeds Section

In the advanced section on that dialog, uncheck the "Turn On Feed Reading View"

Once you do that, refresh the page and you should then see the actual output from your get request and it should look like the following

If for some reason you don't want to turn that off you can also do a View Source and you can view the XML response that way as well.

There's a ton of stuff you can do with the URL for Data Services to modify what it returns.  Check out the simple Addressing Scheme here.