Prevent Simple.OData.Client from fetching the whole structure

Question

I am using simple.odata.client in my application. The problem is the client is retrieving the whole structure at the first call which is too large (more than 30MB) and so I am getting a timeout? Is there any parameter/setting to prevent the client to retrieve the whole structure. Is there any other package which can help me with my application instead of simple.odata.client

Answer 1

The Simple.OData client will retrieve the metadata from the service once for the lifecycle of the object.

You can also initialize the client with a metadata xml string which will prevent the client from making the call.

Below is an except of my code where MetaDataDocumentAsString is the XML metadata as a string. This code also sets the OAuth2 bearer token in the httpclient instance used to create the client.

           HttpClient.BaseAddress = new Uri(AppSettings.Dynamics365.WebAPI_ServiceRootURL);

           //Use the httpClient we setup with the Bearer token header           
           ODataClientSettings odataSettings = new ODataClientSettings(HttpClient, new Uri(WebAPI_VersionRelativeURL, UriKind.Relative))
           {
               //Setting the MetadataDocument property prevent Simple.OData from making the expensive call to get the metadata
               MetadataDocument = MetaDataDocumentAsString
           };
           _ODataClient = new ODataClient(odataSettings);
           HttpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", GetToken().Access_token);}

See the github issue for more details https://github.com/simple-odata-client/Simple.OData.Client/issues/314

Answer 2

I use OData Top and Skip in my client request call. For example;

    var accessToken = await _psUtils.GetUspsReferenceApiAccessToken(token);
    var client = new ODataClient(SetODataToken(_psUtils.GetBaseUspsReferenceApiUrl(), accessToken));
    var annotations = new ODataFeedAnnotations();

    addressComplianceCodes = await client.For<AddressComplianceCode>()
        .Filter(x => x.Description.Contains(searchValue) || x.Code.Contains(searchValue))
        .Top(pageSize).Skip(skip)
        .OrderByDescending(sortColumn)
        .FindEntriesAsync(annotations, token);

and in my client code, I have a pager that tracks the values I pass to top and skip so I can step through the pages. The Top is the total number of records per page. The annotations object returns a Count property you can use to show the total number of records. I.e.

annotations.Count

Here is a link to the OData.org tutorial that talks about top and skip.

https://github.com/simple-odata-client/Simple.OData.Client/wiki/Results-projection,-paging-and-ordering that talks about paging.