Querying WCF Services with OData Params in POST instead of GET

Question

We call wcf svcs (not ours) and we're using gets for searching a product database.

Example: http://foo.com/SearchProducts.svc?$skip=0$take=10$includeTotalCount=true

We were passing the Odata parameters to page the results of the SearchProducts svc. The svc has been changed to a POST because one of our filters "skus" is sometimes huge (hundres of skus) which causes the GET to break because the uri is too large. The easiest solution we thought was to just change the call to a post but now the Odata params dont seem to be used.

Do these params need to be sent in a different manner when doing a POST?

Answer 1

Compliant OData service will not support POST verb for queries (unless you use POST tunneling, but then you're going to be hitting the URL limit anyway). So I wonder how it works for you at all.

The URL size limit can be overcome using several approaches:

• Simplify the query expression. Obviously this can only go so far, but it's usually the best solution as it will likely speed up the query execution as well.
• Use batch instead. You can send the GET request inside a batch. The length of the URL is not an issue in this case, since the query URL is sent in the payload of the batch.
• Define a service operation for the complex query you're using (but since you don't own the service this is probably not a good solution for you).