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
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:
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
:
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!
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;
}
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.