DD4T + OData service

Question

I'm using DD4T and have some XML being generated which I can now query from the OData service. Unfortunately the DD4T content comes back serialised into the content property of the response.

This links back to the question I asked on connecting the two aspects of DD4T - the CM side sticks out XML into the broker, which is fine... but I want some way of creating a loosely coupled platform independent way of retrieving the right content on a URI request to a REST service, meaning MV* patterns can be employed without any dependency on a language.

example:

URL requested - http://test.site/Home/Index

Request routed to a service which then takes over the DD4T function and can sort out the response to the client, with complete component link resolution, into some arbritary data format (JSON in my case)

Rob Stevenson-Leggett kindly provided the link to the OData service provider from DD4T->TCDS - I'm presuming DD4T on the web application side hasn't been RESTified up yet by anyone?

Answer 1

This is how I implement this type of functionality, feel free to disagree with me:

1. Request comes in for page /somepath/index
2. Query to OData to get /Pages()?$filter=Url eq '%2Fsomepath%2Findex'
3. Potentially use a $expand(PageContent) on that URL so that it brings the presentation content as well
4. Load the PageContent, it's been escaped because Tridion cannot guarantee the output of templates are well-formed, so parse it in XML, probably with a strong domain model
5. From there on, build my page.

EDIT

Tridion Component links that are part of the content are resolved, as long as the output from the Tridion publisher is converted to a <tcdl:Link> object. Something called "REL" - Render Engine Language - will convert those <tcdl:Link> to the actual result.

EDIT 2

That same query for the pages could also be written like this:

var page = (from p in contentdeliveryservice.Pages
           where p.Url == '/somepath/index'
           select p).First();