Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Implementing Service Operations

Service operations are .NET methods that can perform data operations on the server side. With service operations developers can preventively establish access rules and customize the business logic, such as data validation or access restrictions. They are basically WCF extensions for Data Services and perform operations via Http requests, meaning that you can execute service operations within a web browser or from a client application. Service operations can return the following types:

• IQueryable(Of T) in data-centric scenarios with EDMs or LINQ-to-SQL models

• IEnumerable(Of T)

• .NET primitive types, because Data Services can also expose in-memory collections

• No type (Sub methods)

Service operations can ...