Web Services Designer Glossary

Association

This is the fundamental building block for describing relationships in the Entity Data Model (EDM). In a conceptual model, an association represents a relationship between two entity types, such as customer and orders. In an application, an instance of an association represents a specific association, such as an association between an instance of customer and an instance of order.

Entity

The entity is the fundamental building block for describing the structure of data with the Entity Data Model (EDM). In a conceptual model, an entity type represents the structure of top-level concepts, such as customers or orders.

The relationship between an entity and an entity set is analogous to the relationship between a row and a table in a relational database. Like a row, an entity describes data structure, and, like a table, an entity set contains instances of a given structure. An entity set is not a data modeling construct; it does not describe the structure of data. Instead, an entity set provides a construct for a hosting or storage environment (such as the common language runtime or a SQL Server database) to group entity instances so that they can be mapped to a data store.

Entity set

An entity set is a logical container for instances of an entity and instances of any type derived from that entity.

Entity (Read/Write)

This is a “stateful” entity that facilitates both fetching data from personify APIs and saving back the changes based on single API root collection. This is capable of handling concurrency and single transaction. Also, this ensures the data integrity and honors the relationships defined in Personify APIs.

Entity (Read-Only)

This is a “stateless” entity that facilitates only fetching data from personify APIs based on single API root collection. Also, this ensures the data integrity and honors the relationships defined in Personify APIs.

Entity (View)

This is a “stateless” entity that facilitates only fetching data from personify APIs. Unlike a Read-only entity, this can return a flat data structure (Cartesian product) from one or more API root collection.

Entity (Service Parameter)

This is a “stateless” entity that facilitates passing data to and from service operations. This supports both primitive and complex data type properties. This does not need to be mapped to personify APIs.

OData

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems, and traditional websites.

OData is consistent with the way the web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the web). This commitment to core web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.

Service Operation

This is similar to a web method in traditional web services, which is a part of WCF Data Services. This accepts an entity as input parameter and returns an entity back.

Validation Issue

Validation issues are the issues encountered while validating the data provided by the Data Services to Personify APIs for the given business scenario. For example, when the member registers for the meeting and meeting registration data is already passed, Personify APIs throws a validation issue.

WCF Data Services

WCF Data Services (formerly known as "ADO.NET Data Services") is a component of the .NET Framework that enables you to create services that use the Open Data Protocol (OData) to expose and consume data over the web or intranet by using the semantics of representational state transfer (REST). OData exposes data as resources that are addressable by URIs. Data is accessed and changed by using standard HTTP verbs of GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. OData uses the entity-relationship conventions of the Entity Data Model to expose resources as sets of entities that are related by associations.

WCF Data Services uses the OData protocol for addressing and updating resources. In this way, you can access these services from any client that supports OData. OData enables you to request and write data to resources by using well-known transfer formats: Atom, a set of standards for exchanging and updating data as XML, and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), a text-based data exchange format used extensively in AJAX application.

WCF Data Services can expose data that originates from various sources as OData feeds. Visual Studio tools make it easier for you to create an OData-based service by using an ADO.NET Entity Framework data model. You can also create OData feeds based on common language runtime (CLR) classes and even late-bound or un-typed data.

WCF Data Services also includes a set of client libraries, one for general .NET Framework client applications and another specifically for Silverlight-based applications. These client libraries provide an object-based programming model when you access an OData feed from environments such as the .NET Framework and Silverlight.

Web Service

A Web Service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over a network. Web Services were intended to solve three main problems: Firewall Traversal, Complexity, and Interoperability.

The W3C defines a "Web Service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically Web Services Description Language WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards."

The W3C also states, "We can identify two major classes of Web services, REST-compliant Web services, in which the primary purpose of the service is to manipulate XML representations of Web resources using a uniform set of "stateless" operations; and arbitrary Web services, in which the service may expose an arbitrary set of operations."