I've just been toying around with the new WCF RIA Services Beta for Silverlight this evening. So far it looks nice, but I've come across a few barriers when trying to retrieve data and exposing it to the UI via binding.
First of all, how am I able to get a single integer or string value from my service? Say if I have this method on my domainservice:
public int CountEmployees()
{
return this.ObjectContext.Employees.Count();
}
How am I able to make a call to this and bind the result to, say, a TextBlock?
Also, is there any way to make a custom layout for binding data? I feel a little "limited" to ListBox, DataGrid and such. How is it possible to, i.e., make a Grid with a stackpanel inside and have some TextBlocks showing the bound data? If it's possible at all with WCF RIA Services 🙂
Thanks a lot in advance.
Best Answer
To do custom methods you can use the
Invoke
attribute. In the server side you declare in a domain service like thisAnd in your Client-side you can use it like this
For the second question, you are not limited with binding. The object you get from your context can be binded with any elements you want.