Question

I am building a web service using WCF. This service has to support REST.

Here is what I did so far:

I configured the app with a baseAddress, the mex endpoint and an additional endpoint which has a webhttpbinding.

Here is the service configuration:

<service name="ServiceLibrary.Service" behaviorConfiguration="myServiceBehavior">
    <endpoint 
        address="" 
        behaviorConfiguration="webHttp"
        binding="webHttpBinding" bindingConfiguration="" 
        contract="ServiceLibrary.IEvalService" >
    </endpoint>
    <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/>
    <host>
      <baseAddresses>
        <add baseAddress="http://localhost:8732/sdata/myApp/myContract/-/"/>
      </baseAddresses>
    </host>
  </service>

And here is the behavior configuration:

 <serviceBehaviors>
    <behavior name="myServiceBehavior">
      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>
    </behavior>
    <behavior>
      <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/>
      <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false"/>
    </behavior>
  </serviceBehaviors>
  <endpointBehaviors>
    <behavior name="webHttp">
      <webHttp/>
    </behavior>
  </endpointBehaviors>

I am setting up a service contract like this:

[ServiceContract]
public interface IEvalService
{
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "/employees('{MDNr}:{ANNr}')")]
    Atom10ItemFormatter GetEmployeeByPK(string MDNr, string ANNr);

    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet]
    string employees(string queryString);
}

And I am handling the operation contract in a separate class:

public class Service : IEvalService
{
    public Atom10ItemFormatter GetEmployeeByPK(string MDNr, string ANNr){return Employee.GetEmployeeByPK(MDNr, ANNr);}
    public string employees(string queryString)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Query: " + queryString);
        return queryString;
    }

Both methods get called after executing the GET method.

I am calling the first one like this:

http://localhost:8732/sdata/myApp/myContract/-/employees('3:37')

It works perfectly, giving me the IDs, etc.

The second one I am calling like this:

http://localhost:8732/sdata/myApp/myContract/-/employees?where=name eq 'bla'

And here is where the trouble starts. The Method employees is getting called, but it receives no string. And I don’t know why. This is exactly the same code, like in those tutorials, I just changed the names…

Does anyone see the mistake I obviously made? I would really appreciate any help.

One more thing: I am working with .Net 4.0 and am running this over the debugger so I can call the urls via firefox rest client? This is a service library project.

Answer 1

Try to change the parameter’s name:

string employees(string **where**);

or change the url:

http://localhost:8732/sdata/myApp/myContract/-/employees?**queryString**=name eq 'bla'

Answer to your comment:

1. Make a single parameter named ‘query’ and then parse its value. In this case you are responsible for parsing the query from string to real query and execute it.
2. Check the ‘WCF Data Services‘. It may help you querying data using URL.