How do I call custom methods in a Wcf Data Service from a Silverlight application?

Question

I have the following Wcf Data Service:

public class WcfDataService : DataService<WcfDataServiceContext>
{
    public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config)
    {
        config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All);
        config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("*", ServiceOperationRights.All);
        config.UseVerboseErrors = true;
    }

    [WebGet]
    public IQueryable<Person> GetPeopleByName(string name)
    {
        WcfDataServiceContext context = this.CurrentDataSource;

        var match = from p in context.People
                    where p.FirstName == name
                    select p;

        return match;
    }

I can access the custom method from the browser like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/DataService/WcfDataService.svc/GetPeopleByName?name='Daniel'

How can I call that method and get that list of Person from a Silverlight application?

I'm using Visual Studio 2012, Silverlight 5, .NET Framework 4.0.

Answer 1

As far as I remember whe using Silverlight you cannot connect to a different server than the one the Silverlight app came from so you would just use a relative Uri. If you would like to use WCF Data Services client you can take a look here: http://forums.silverlight.net/t/208481.aspx - there is a code snippet that shows it. However AFAIK WCF Data Services client does not support Service Operation so you may need to use XmlReader to be able to query and parse the response of the GetPeopleByName function.