YUI DataTable with ADO.NET Data Services

The Yahoo User Interface library (YUI) is an awesome client-side UI library, and ADO.NET Data Services is an equally awesome server-side framework for exposing a service layer for your data.

However, there is little documentation on how to get the 2 technologies to talk to one-another. Microsoft are pitching ADO.NET Data Services to marry up with Sliverlight - and rightly so, but like a lot of people, my skills are firmly grounded in AJAX.

Searching around, Jim Fiorato has written a great article on integrating a data service with a YUI chart but that's about it at this stage.

So far I've managed to get a YUI DataTable to display data from an ADO.NET Data Service, along with paging and sorting.

ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP1

I need to highlight a shortfall in the current version of ADO.NET Data Services (1.0) - it does not return a count of all rows. Without this, displaying pages of data is nigh impossible as we simply don't know how many pages to display.

Thankfully, the issue has been resolved in the v1.5 CTP, you can download it here. Note that this is a pre-release version so I'm really hanging out for the final release.

Sample Project on CodePlex

I've created a sample project that contains a simple ADO.NET Data Service, and a sample page that implements a YUI DataTable. Note: You must first install the v1.5 CTP for it to compile.

I'm hoping to add more samples of other YUI components down the track.

Instead of writing a huge blog post explaining all the steps, I've added detailed code comments in the sample project.

Anthony.