DataSource not working with ASP.NET Web API oData

Hello,

 The "odata" type of DataSource should be used only with full implementations of OData. Web API is not OData and returns JSON in different format than the one returned by an OData service. The Kendo DataSource expects valid OData response in order to work.
 
If you want to use the odata parameter map to translate the current filter, page and sort expressions to OData format you can check this forum thread.

Perhaps in the long term a new type of data source "webapi" would be introduced which would support the response from Web API. 

 On a side note WebAPI does not seem to currently support $inlinecount which effectively disables any paging support.

Regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team

Yeah I realize that. I think it's best to wait and see what they do for RTM with this. I was reading somewhere on Twitter they might be even replacing the default JSON Parser used in Web API too. Hopefully they expose more stuff to make it more usable.

Either way, this demo was modeled after this blog post by Stephen Walter:
http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2012/03/05/introduction-to-the-asp-net-web-api.aspx

He mentions at the bottom using $top and $skip to implement paging. I'll play with it more when I have time. Thanks for pointing out to this paramterMap override thread. I was looking at the parameterMap last night myself but was too tired to dissect parameters last night.

Adding a 'webapi' type to the DataSource though would be a great solution if you can get basic paging, sorting and filtering working. Even if there are limitations, if the core stuff works, I think this will be great in the end. It'll make building apps with Kendo and Web API so easy and fast. Well other than trying to use it as odata source, everything else works fine when treating it as plain JSON. If we can implement paging, filtering and sorting using some generic way using parameterMap override that should work too in the short term.

Just wanted to say I'm definitely looking forward to when this all works seamlessly together!

Add me to the list of people that would like to see webapi work seamlessly with kendo.  As the author of the KendoGridBinder, I know first-hand, json is a nasty way to business as the requests are not very pleasant to deal with.

'webapi' is definitely a must have for our company too.

Hello,

 The recommended way to proceed is to open a new user voice item for this.

Kind regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team

Perhaps instead of fully supporting Web API, which would be great of course, you instead allow finer control over the data source format. Specifically, instead of blanket "odata" or "json" data types, we're allowed to set query data format separately from response data format. So the query format could be "odata" while the response would be "json".

Hello,

 Currently the datasource has no notion of response and request formats. The only specialized kind of data source is OData.

I think what you need can be achieved even now bu using the odata parameter map:

Regards,
Atanas Korchev
the Telerik team