How to parse OData $filter with regular expression in C#?

Question

Hi I'm wondering what the best approach would be to parse an OData $filter string in C#, for example

/API/organisations?$filter="name eq 'Facebook' or name eq 'Twitter' and subscribers gt '30'"

Should return all organisations with a name of Facebook or Twitter and who have more than 30 subscribers. I've researched quite a bit but can't find any solutions which don't revolve around WCF. I was thinking of using Regex and grouping them so I have a list of Filter classes such that:

Filter
    Resource: Name
    Operator: Eq
    Value: Facebook
Filter
    Resource: Name
    Operator: Eq
    Value: Twitter
Filter
    Resource: Subscribers
    Operator: gt
    Value: 30

but I'm stumped as how to handle ANDs / ORs.

Answer 1

In .NET, there's a library available that will do this for you. Writing your own regex runs the risk of missing some edge case.

Using NuGet, bring in Microsoft.Data.OData. Then, you can do:

using Microsoft.Data.OData.Query;

var result = ODataUriParser.ParseFilter(
  "name eq 'Facebook' or name eq 'Twitter' and subscribers gt 30",
  model,
  type);

result here will be in the form of an AST representing the filter clause.

(To get the model and type inputs, you could parse your $metadata file using something like this:

using Microsoft.Data.Edm;
using Microsoft.Data.Edm.Csdl;

IEdmModel model = EdmxReader.Parse(new XmlTextReader(/*stream of your $metadata file*/));
IEdmEntityType type = model.FindType("organisation");

)