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OData with async

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10 Sep 2012CPOL 12.9K   1  
Using OData with async.

Today I watched this video about using OData in a WinRT app: http://blog.jerrynixon.com/2012/08/new-episode-devradio-let-odata-make.html.

To summarize, he (Jerry Nixon) add a service reference to the Netflix OData API at http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog. and then proceed to do something like that

C#
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    var _uri = new Uri("http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/");
    var ctxt = new NetFlixService.NetflixCatalog(_uri);
    var data = new DataServiceCollection<NetFlixService.Title>(ctxt);

    var query = from t in ctxt.Titles
                where t.Name.Contains("Star Trek")
                select t;
    data.LoadCompleted += delegate 
    {
        this.DataContext = data;
    };
    data.LoadAsync(query);
}

Basically he creates an OData service reference, runs a database query against it, and shows the results.

What I wanted to change is, use the new async/await keyword in .NET 4.5 instead of the LoadCompleted delegate.

There seems to be no obvious way of doing that! Time to Google!

From the await (C# Reference) reference it seems that await can (only) be applied to a method returning a Task, and a Task (from Googling) can be created from IAsyncResult.

So first I started by creating a very simple and reusable IAsyncResult implementation class:

C#
public class SimpleAsyncResult : IAsyncResult, IDisposable
{
    ManualResetEvent waitHandle = new ManualResetEvent(false);

    public void Finish()
    {
        IsCompleted = true;
        waitHandle.Set();
        waitHandle.Dispose();
    }

    public void Dispose() { waitHandle.Dispose(); }

    public bool IsCompleted { get; private set; }
    public object AsyncState { get; set; }
    public bool CompletedSynchronously { get; set; }

    public WaitHandle AsyncWaitHandle { get { return waitHandle; } }
}

With that I can easily create an extension method for my OData classes returning a Task:

C#
public static class OData
{
    public static Task<DataServiceCollection<T>> AsyncQuery<T>(
           this DataServiceCollection<T> data, IQueryable<T> query = null)
    {
        var asyncr = new SimpleAsyncResult();
        Exception exResult = null;
        data.LoadCompleted += delegate(object sender, LoadCompletedEventArgs e)
        {
            exResult = e.Error;
            asyncr.Finish();
        };

        if (query == null)
            data.LoadAsync();
        else
            data.LoadAsync(query);

        return Task<DataServiceCollection<T>>.Factory.FromAsync(asyncr
            , r =>
            {
                if (exResult != null)
                    throw new AggregateException("Async call problem", exResult);
                return data;
            }
        );
    }
}

Remark here, I wrap the exception because I don’t want to lose the stack trace (with “throw exResult”).

And voila I can update my NavigatedTo method to be async friendly!

C#
protected async override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    var _uri = new Uri("http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/");
    var ctxt = new NetFlixService.NetflixCatalog(_uri);
    var data = new DataServiceCollection<NetFlixService.Title>(ctxt);

    var query = from t in ctxt.Titles
                where t.Name.Contains("Star Trek")
                select t;
    await data.AsyncQuery(query);
    this.DataContext = data;
}

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)


Written By
Software Developer (Senior) http://www.ansibleww.com.au
Australia Australia
The Australia born French man who went back to Australia later in life...
Finally got over life long (and mostly hopeless usually, yay!) chronic sicknesses.
Worked in Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin, Billinudgel, Darwin and Melbourne.

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