Consuming an ADO.NET Data Service from a WIN32 Delphi application. How?

Question

Simple. I created a LINQ-TO-SQL Entity model, created a website, added a Data Service (*.svc) to this site and made sure it works by writing a simple .NET console application. The service works fine and cannot be modified.

Now I'm going to write a Delphi application (2007) for WIN32 which will have to call this data service. And while Delphi has no major problems importing a SOAP service, it can't import this service since it provides no WSDL...

So, two options. I could figure out how to generate a WSDL based on this data service or I'll have to find another way to consume this service. (Or just give up, but I hate to quit this challenge.) So, any advise?

Answer 1

Maybe you can use the project Jedi "url grabber" components to consume the service. I have managed to get live share data using these in the past. I do not know exactly how your setup works, but maybe these can be helpful.

http://www.delphi-jedi.org/

Answer 2

ADO.NET Data Services are REST services. They are not SOAP WebServices and I don't think REST uses WSDL. You can call REST services from Delphi using HTTP GET/PUT/POST/DELETE. You could use Indy's TIdHTTPClient. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668786.aspx for url examples. The results are in the Atom format, which is a XML format. You could parse it with TXMLDocument. They can also return JSON.

Answer 3

You should also look at synapse, a small easy to use library which works well with REST. The latest version, which can be downloaded via SVN, works well in Delphi 2009.