Azure API Management issue with OData

Question

We have an OData v4 API that we are putting behind an Azure API Management (AAM) service, but have run into a problem configuring the routes/oerations. In a nutshell, the issue is that AAM will reject a query for a route/operation unless it is explicitly configured (you get a 404 error), but with OData there can be a route for every attribute (property) of every operation (endpoint). The problem quickly becomes unmanageable.

OData allows you to query an individual attribute/property (eg GET ~/api/Person(1234)/FirstName. If we put this behind AAM, we need to define it as an operation. That's OK as long as there are only a few of these, but it potentially means you quickly have to define hundreds/thousands of operations (unless I've missed something). We have an API with about 35 top level operations. Each resource has 20 attributes on average. That's 700 operations we would need to define. Apart from the work involved, that would be a shocking experience for users of the AAM developer portal.

I'm hoping someone can tell me an easy way to get around this problem. I know I can script the creation of these. You an also get around this problem to some degree if you use an OData $select query parameter (which is what I've suggested in the meantime). I can't get over the feeling I've missed something here. Is there a way of defining some sort of wildcard portion to the operation (eg /Person/*)? I can't find anything like that in the AAM documentation.

Answer 1

Try using URL templates instead of writing them explicitly, i.e. define operations for /{entity}/{property} this way it'll match every entity and every property of every entity. And you could use wildcards as well if you want to capture multiple segments at the end of URL.