mca blog

i did a bit of digging into WCF this week. i was looking into the details of the UriTemplate services provided by WCF. looking for ideas on how to improve my UriPattern support in exyus. didn't really find much, tho.

i also got a chance to peruse the 'REST support' in WCF - not so much. here's a simple example on the MSDN site:

[ServiceContract]
interface ICustomer
{
  //"View It"
  [OperationContract]
  [WebGet]
  Customer GetCustomer():
  
  //"Do It"
  [OperationContract]
  [WebInvoke]
  Customer UpdateCustomerName( string id, 
                               string newName );
}

The preceding code allows you to make the following HTTP requests.

GET /GetCustomer
POST /UpdateCustomerName


nope. not liking it at all. really kinda disappointed, too. i still think my approach is better:

// example handler for a product category resource
[UriPattern(@"/data/products/(?<pid>[^/?.]*)(.*)?")]
[MediaTypes("text/html", "text/xml")]
public class productsResource : XmlFileResource
{
    public productsResource()
    {
        this.ContentType = "text/html";
        this.AllowPost = false;
        this.AllowDelete = true;
        this.AllowCreateOnPut = true;
        this.DocumentsFolder = "~/documents/products/";
        this.StorageFolder = "~/storage/products/";
        this.LocalMaxAge = 600;
        this.ImmediateCacheUriTemplates = new string[]
            {
                "/data/products/",
                "/data/products/{pid}"
            };
    }
}

the above (along with some XSL/XSD documents to handle some details) is all you need to support the following operations:

GET /data/products/
GET /data/products/{pid}
PUT /data/products/{pid}
DELETE /data/products/{pid}


the above code automatically handles caching of GET operations; properly supports ETags to ensure there is no Lost Update problems when editing existing resources; and even supports multiple media types for the same resource.

i've spent several months tweaking my exyus engine and, based on what i'm seeing and hearing, i think it's about ready to see the light of day!