In my database User table I have DataTime field called DateDeleted - which is null while user exists and is set to the proper value when user "is deleted".
I wonder if there is a way to introduce IsDeleted property for User entity so that
http://odata/service.svc/Users(1)/IsDeleted
will return true or false depending on whether DateDeleted is set or not
My research in google hasn't got any results and I am almost sure it is not possible to implement through odata. Am I right?
With the built in providers this is not possible on the WCF DS side of things. You might be able to somehow do this on the EF side (expose it as a property of the EF entity), but I'm not sure if that's possible. On the WCF DS side, you would have to implement a custom provider in order to do this. Which may be quite a lot of work unfortunately. If you're interested see this for starters: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexj/archive/2010/01/07/data-service-providers-getting-started.aspx. What Shawn refers to above is a method on the custom provider interface.
You can specify the value you want by implementing the method DataServiceQueryProvider.GetPropertyValue.
Please find the reference here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.services.providers.idataservicequeryprovider.getpropertyvalue.aspx
The method takes two parameters, the entity object (a User instance) and the resource property (in this case "IsDeleted"). You can try to get the property value of "DataDeleted" from the entity object, and return the value of "IsDeleted" as you want.
