Modifying entities with the REST API is CRUD (part 1) - Inserting entities

12.3.1. Inserting entities

Before we look at how to insert an entity using the REST API, let’s look at the code you’d write to store an entity in a table using the StorageClient library:

var shirtContext = new ProductContext();

shirtContext.AddObject("Products",
   new Product
   {
      PartitionKey = "Shirts",
      RowKey = "RedShirt",
      Name = "Red Shirt",
      Description = "A Red Shirt"
   });

shirtContext.SaveChanges();

The preceding example inserts a new instance of the Product entity into the Products table. The new Product will be stored in the Shirts partition with a RowKey value of RedShirt. 

Now that we’ve reminded ourselves of how to insert a new entity into a table using the StorageClient library, let’s look at how this would be done using the REST API directly.

Using the REST API

To use the AtomPub-based REST API to insert a new entity into a table, you’d need to perform an HTTP POST request to the following URI:

http://<storageaccountname>.table.core.windows.net/<TableName>

To insert a new entity into the Products table in the silverlightukstorage storage account, you’d use the following URI:

http://silverlightukstorage.table.core.windows.net/Products

To insert the entity we created at the beginning of section 1 with the StorageClient library, you’d need to define the request body with the following Atom XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<entry xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <title />
  <updated>2009-07-27T14:22:48.8875037Z</updated>
  <author>
    <name />
  </author>
  <id />
  <content type="application/xml">
    <m:properties>
      <d:Description>A Red Shirt</d:Description>
      <d:Name>Red Shirt</d:Name>
      <d:PartitionKey>Shirts</d:PartitionKey>
      <d:RowKey>RedShirt</d:RowKey>
      <d:Timestamp m:type="Edm.DateTime">0001-01-01T00:00:00</d:Timestamp>
    </m:properties>
  </content>
</entry>

					  

If you look at the preceding AtomPub XML, you can see that it follows a similar format to the XML used to create the storage account table in section 1 of this article.. As you can see from the preceding Atom XML, not only are the values of each property of the entity included in the XML, but so is the name and type of each property (notice that the Timestamp property is of type Edm.DateTime). Because a Table service table is effectively schemaless, and each row could contain an entity with an entirely different set of properties, it’s important that the entities being inserted into the table be self-describing.

If you wanted to modify the console application in listing 2 to insert an entity instead of creating a table, you could replace the URI generation with the URI we defined earlier and replace the Atom XML with the preceding document.

Now that you’ve created your lovely entity, let’s nuke it!