breeze exclude specific entities from metadata web api controller response

Question

I'm just wondering if there's any way I can easily trim down the entities in my metadata response from the Breeze Controller in my project. Simple being something like the JsonIgnore attribute that can be added to an entities metadata to exclude specific properties (or the data related to them at least).

I'm not too concerned about it, but I like my code to be efficient and I could potentially remove 50% of my entities from the client facing metadata store as I have plenty entities specific to business logic that has no place in the client side app and I guess for the most part I'd prefer not to be broadcasting a map of my entire database schema to the entire world.

Jay Traband Jay Traband · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-20T17:21:30

Right now there is no easy way if you are going thru the EFContextProvider, because we are just taking the Entity Framework CSDL, converting it to Json and sending it down the wire. What you can do, but does require some plumbing work, is trim the 'jsonized' CSDL on the server before you send it to the client, i.e. something like.

[HttpGet]
public String Metadata() {
  var metadata = ContextProvider.Metadata();
  // trim the metadata here
  // metadata = trimMetadata(metadata);
  return metadata;
}

If you are not going thru EF or are willing to construct the metadata, 'by hand' in code on the server, then this is not an issue, Breeze will accept either CSDL metadata or what we call Breeze native metadata as a valid return from the Metadata call. The native metadata format is described here: Breeze Metadata.

In this case you can create metadata to describe as little or as much of the model as you want to expose.

The idea of Breeze providing some more automated mechanism for trimming CSDL metadata does make a lot of sense though. If you feel that this would be helpful, you can add this as a request to the Breeze User Voice. We take this venue very seriously in determining which features to focus on.

breeze exclude specific entities from metadata web api controller response

1 Answers