Article on using Kiota for Generating an API Client from an ASP.NET Core OData Service

[bytefish]

I have written an article, that shows how to use the Kiota CLI for generating a C# client for an ASP.NET Core OData Service. It also shows how to register and use the ApiClient in a Blazor application:

• https://www.bytefish.de/blog/odata_openapi_kiota_client_generation.html

I think it's a nice setup and it shows how well all pieces (ASP.NET Core OData, EntityFramework Core, Blazor, Kiota) fit together.

The repository can be found at:

• https://github.com/bytefish/ODataRebacExperiments

[baywet]

Hi @bytefish
Thank you so much for putting together this very articulate and detailed article of kiota in "real life".
CC @sebastienlevert our PM to see if he can get this article shared on the social media channels (Microsoft 365 dev, etc...)
I submitted a pull request to your repo to add a couple of links, no pressure if you don't want the changes. bytefish/bytefish.de#55

If you're interested about writing about the other features of kiota like search, filtering, etc... let us know how we can help!

[bytefish]

@baywet Thanks for the kind words! I have merged the PR and published it.

If the example should be shared to a wider audience, I would probably use something like the Wide World Importers database (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/samples/wide-world-importers-what-is) as the data source. That would have the benefit of being a more "real life" database, making the Wide World Importers database a bit more popular and it comes with a lot of interesting data and features.

By using EntityFramework Core Power Tools one could generate the EntityFramework Core DbContext easily. The data could be exposed with ASP.NET Core OData and an API Client SDK could be generated with Kiota. The ApiClient could then be integrated in a Blazor application, and ideally some Authentication (Azure AD, OAuth 2.0) could be shown.

[baywet]

Yep that makes sense. As you might have noticed, Kiota already provides an Azure Identity authentication provider, I think another article building on this one, but focusing on authentication and this alternative DB would make a lot of sense.

[bytefish]

@baywet @sebastienlevert This is pretty cool, and as another data point for the Kiota team, on whats possible. I have just updated the Wide World Importers Example Application, I wrote a year ago, to also use Kiota. It wraps the WideWorldImporters database behind an OData Service and comes with a pretty complex data model.

You can find it here:

• https://github.com/bytefish/WideWorldImporters

Kiota generates a working client out of the box, even the EDM Geographic types generated correctly.

I am very, very impressed with the quality of the generated client, and I am not saying this to please you.