Accessing Data with Windows Mobile 6.5 Widgets, Ajax 4, Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services.

Step 1: Creating Your Projects

Create a new ASP.NET Web Application (new solution) called DataWidgetDemo. You can delete the Default.aspx page as this is not required.

Add new web site to your solution. Select the Empty Website template, change the location to be nested within your solution folder (by default it goes under documents and settings) and call the website ProductWidget. The location should look like c:<solution root>DataWidgetDemoProductWidget. You can delete the web.config file as this is not required.

Your solution should look similar to the following:

Step 2: Adding Data

There are two components to exposing data (done in the DataWidgetDemo project):

a) Create an Entity Data Model which will interact with the AdventureWorksLT database– To do this, select Add New Item and then select the ADO.NET Entity Data Model from the Add New Item dialog. In our example we have named the new item AdventureWorksModel.edmx.

Work through the Entity Data Model Wizard, specifying the connection string for your database instance. When prompted, select the Product and ProductCategory tables. You don’t need to change any of the other default values in this wizard. Once complete this should yield the entity designer with the two tables displayed.

b) In order to consume this from our widget we need to expose the AdventureWorks data via an ADO.NET Data Service. To do this select Add New Item and pick the ADO.NET Data Service template. Give the new item a name: AdventureWorksData.svc and select Add.

Once this item has been added you just need to specify which data set you want to expose. The text marked in red are the components that have been updated in order to expose all the tables (ie *) in the AdventureWorksLTEntities data model

public class AdventureWorksData : DataService<AdventureWorksLTEntities>
   {
       // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies.
       public static void InitializeService(IDataServiceConfiguration config)
       {
           // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc.
           // Examples:
          config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);
           // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All);
       }
   }

Step 4: Add Ajax 4 JS Libraries

This step requires referencing the ASP.NET Ajax 4 javascript libraries. As these are still pre-release the location of these files is not well defined but you should be able to locate them on your machine in order to copy them into the ProductWidget web site.

Step 5: Building the Products page

The products page is just going to be a simple html page. Windows Mobile 6.5 can’t render ASP.NET pages (ie aspx) pages as part of widgets as this would require having the equivalent of the ASP.NET server engine on the device. As such widgets are constrained to html, css and javascript. To generate the products page select Add New Item on the ProductWidget web site. Select the HTML Page template and give the new page a name, Products.htm, and click Add.

Here we are only going to use HTML! There is not a single of javascript in the following code snippet. There is javascript, but it’s all included in the ASP.NET Ajax 4 library.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html >http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
    <title>AdventureWorks – Products</title>
    <style type="text/css">
        .sys-template {display: none;}
        .rowSelected {background-color: yellow;}
    </style>

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