Question: OData DB Query References

[chris-clark-serverless]

We have been using OData successfully in our project. However, recently we needed to build an endpoint that did not use OData. In that endpoint we returned an ActionResult of IEnumerable

What we noticed after returning this object which came from our DB using Entity Framework Core, a 500! After looking into it, the Query Included an Include. We use Includes extensively and every object has these virtual collections pointing back to every object that has a FK to pretty much every table. So even the OData implementation has these.

As a stop-gap I added the JSON serializing setting to handle reference loops. And now I'm curious, how does OData handle it? Do you let EFCore return these garbage circular references, and handle them client side, app server side? Or do you do internal massaging of the query as to not return the circular references?

[habbes]

I'm not sure what exactly the OData library does, if anything, to address this specific problem. But here are some candidates:

• OData library has a limit to how deep it can recurse
• OData protocol allows using references in the response payload to refer to entities that have already been included in the payload. This could be used to address the issue of circular references, but I'm not sure if the library actually implements this feature.