About

This document aims to provide organized content about how to build a OData V4 service using ASP.NET Web API for OData. It’s more than just a getting started guidance and is more systematic than the samples.

Version

This is the first version of this document written in April, 2015.

Targetted audience

This document fits best the readers who has a relative good knowledge of OData (e.g. knowing the OData primitive and structured types, knowing the basic OData URL conventions, knowing the basic OData features such as operations, queries and so on) and would like to explore how some advanced scenarios can be implemented using Web API for OData.

Beginners to OData or Web API for OData can also leverage this document as a structured way to learn. But it’s strongly recommended to read the Getting Started tutorials on OData.org to get a grasp of OData concepts before reading this doc.

This document also assumes that the readers know how to create projects in Visual Studio and know how to install packages using the Nuget Package Manager. It also assumes they have knowledge in C# programming and are not unfamiliar with concepts like classes, properties, methods, and so on.

Structure of this document

This document starts with a tutorial about how a simplest OData V4 service can be written using ASP.NET Web API for OData. Then it steps into the section about how OData models can be built in different ways. After that, OData routing is introduced in details followed by a description of OData feature implementation. Finally, it talks about security and customization of the OData V4 service.

Resources and references