Modeling Navigation Properties

By default, the driver models Navigation Properties as separate views. The views are named in the format ParentTable_NavigationProperty. You can disable this behavior with NavigationPropertiesAsViews.

Querying Navigation Properties

For an example of working with a navigation property as a view, consider the Northwind sample service from odata.org. In this service, the Categories entity set has a Products navigation property. The CData ODBC Driver for OData will display a view called Categories_Products for this service. Retrieving data from Categories_Products will display all of the Products associated with a given Category. The Categories_Products view has a primary key made up of the Id of the parent entity and the Id of the related entity.

Support for navigation properties is limited in some OData services. See NavigationPropertiesAsViews and SupportsExpand for more information on API restrictions when querying navigation properties.