OData Lives! 12-Year-Old RESTful API Protocol Put to New Use in Age of Blazor and ASP.NET Core

Back in 2016, I asked Microsoft about the status of OData -- the RESTful API protocol it developed back in 2007 -- because it seemed its initial buzz had tapered off dramatically. I was assured by the company that "both within the standards organizations and the industry, OData is alive and growing."

I didn't think much more about it, but suddenly I notice it being put to new uses in the age of Blazor and ASP.NET Core, championed at Microsoft by Hassan Habib, sofware engineer II.

As a reminder, Microsoft described OData (Open Data Protocol) to me thusly:

OData is a set of common conventions on top of HTTP, REST, and JSON. These conventions embody best practices for building web-based APIs, and by following these conventions services gain interoperability across a growing number of tools, libraries, applications and services.

Accepted as an OASIS standard, it can now be found at OData.org, which says:

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc. OData also provides guidance for tracking changes, defining functions/actions for reusable procedures, and sending asynchronous/batch requests.

OData RESTful APIs are easy to consume. The OData metadata, a machine-readable description of the data model of the APIs, enables the creation of powerful generic client proxies and tools.

Google Trends show interest in OData peaked in April 2015 and seemingly has been slightly declining since, though enjoying a recent upsurge.

It looks like Microsoft's Hassan Habib, might have something to do with that, finding new ways to use it with the red-hot Blazor project (C# and .NET for client/server Web programming) and ASP.NET Core (open source, cross-platform implementation of ASP.NET for Web development).

In the last month Habib has penned blog posts such as:

• Supercharging ASP.NET Core API with OData: "In this article, I'm going to show you how you can supercharge your existing ASP.NET Core APIs with OData to provide better experience for your API consumers with only 4 lines of code."
• Simplifying EDM with OData: "In this article, however, I'm going to show you how you can enable OData on your existing ASP.NET Core API using EDM [Entity Data Model]."
• Enabling Pagination in Blazor with OData: "In this article, we are going to talk about navigation from an abstract perspective as a plain API call, then leverage that power in a Blazor application to enable data navigation or pagination."

In one post, Habib said, "Bundling multiple powerful technologies such as Blazor and OData with ASP.NET Core might save you a lot of time implementing functionality that is simply a boilerplate, a functionality that doesn't necessarily make your application any different from any other."

Judging from reader comments, there's a lot of interest in OData in Microsoft's .NET camp of developers, some of whom were apparently oblivious to the protocol ("Hey I didnt know that this actually exists O.o so this is similiar to graphQL? Hey thanks for info man").

Hey, in case you have similar questions, man, Habib pointed to a comparison of OData and GraphQL.

Meanwhile, I'd like to hear about other .NET-centric developers using OData in the new Core era, how, why and so on. If you'd care to share your story, please drop me an email or comment below. And happy ODataing!

Posted by David Ramel on 05/20/2019