SQL SERVER – Invoking a Stored Procedure from Azure Mobile Services – Notes from the Field #066

One of the questions I’m often asked is whether it’s possible to call SQL stored procedures from Azure Mobile Services. The answer is yes and it’s probably easier than you think. In case you don’t know, Azure Mobile Services is a way to very simply expose an HTTP service over data stored in an Azure SQL database. By default, Azure Mobile Services exposes the SQL tables directly as resources. So the HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT and DELETE will essentially be mapped to SQL operations on the underlying tables.

While this simple mapping mechanism is good for resource-oriented access to the tables, the logic to produce a usable Web API is often a bit more complex than that. Stored procedures can provide an interesting abstraction layer that allows us to use the efficiencies of the SQL Server query engine to reduce round trips to and from Internet clients, for example. Or perhaps stored procedures might be used to hide normalization peculiarities from clients or perhaps to use advanced parameter handling logic. Whatever the case may be, it would be helpful from time to time to be able to invoke stored procedures from the HTTP API that Azure Mobile Services provides.

Let’s start by assuming that an Azure Mobile Service exists with some data that we would like to expose via a stored procedure. For the purposes of this example, my service is called MobileWeatherAlert which contains a backing table in an Azure SQL Database named [MobileWeatherAlert_db]. It’s really helpful that Azure Mobile Services uses schema separation in the underlying database to manage all of its data. That schema separation allows us to expose many separate middle-tier services from one common database if needed. So, in my weather database, there’s a schema called [MobileWeatherAlert] corresponding perfectly to the name of the service that it supports. For the purposes of this example, that schema contains a table called [Observation] which is used to collect weather data by [City].

Figure 1 shows a very simple stored procedure called [GetObservationsForCity] that I’d like to be able to call from the service API.

There are a number of places where this procedure might be invoked. For this example, I’ll implement a custom API in the mobile service called observation.

Figure 2 shows the dialog in the Azure management console where the custom API will be created.

For this simple example, I’ll only implement the HTTP GET method in the API to invoke the stored procedure. For simplicity of the example, I’ll open up access to everyone to avoid having to pass any sort of credentials. Now I can add a bit of JavaScript to the API to make the stored procedure call.

Figure 3 demonstrates adding that JavaScript to the API via the Azure management console.

Lines 1 through 9 in the script encompass the get function that will be invoked when the HTTP GET method is used to call the service. The parameters passed to the JavaScript function are the request and response objects. From the request object, line 2 shows how to obtain a reference to the mssql object which exposes a query function for making calls into the database. Line 3 demonstrates how to call the query function to execute the [GetObservationsForCity] stored procedure, passing a single parameter for the City by which to filter. It’s important to note here that the schema in which the stored procedure resides is not named in the EXEC call. This is counter-intuitive, in my opinion, and is likely to trip up novices as they experiment with this functionality. Since we are invoking the GET method for the MobileWeatherAlert service, there’s an implicit assumption used in the preparation of the SQL statement that objects will reside in a similarly-named database schema.

Notice also on Line 3 that the request object passed into the JavaScript function exposes a query property that conveniently contains an object named city which will be parsed directly from the URL.

Figure 4 shows how that URL might be passed from PostMan, a really excellent Google Chrome plug in that allows the invocation of nearly any sort of HTTP-oriented web service or API.

Finally, lines 4 through 6 of the JavaScript method, the success function that process the results of the SQL query logs the results and returns them to the caller with an HTTP 201 (OK) response. I’ve included a called to the console.log() function to show how easy it is to log just about anything when you’re debugging your JavaScript code in Azure Mobile Services. After invoking an API or custom resource method that logs something, check out the logs tab of the mobile service in the management console to see what got saved. Of course, you’ll want to do minimal logging in production but while you’re testing and debugging, the log is a valuable resource.

In studying the URL and its output in Figure 4, remember that the JavaScript for the observation API didn’t have to do any special parsing of the row set returned by SQL Server to produce this result. Simply returning that data from SQL Server caused the API to emit JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) which has arguably become the lingua franca of the Internet for expressing data.

In closing, I’ll share a couple of thoughts. If you’re interested in building a simple query interface on top of a mobile service, you don’t have to use stored procedures as shown here. Azure Mobile Services implements fairly rich OData support directly on table resources. With OData, filtering, sorting and pagination of SQL data are built in, so to speak. Also, the web way of doing services (sometimes called RESTful based on Dr. Roy Fielding’s dissertation and the HTTP standards that flowed from it), assume that we’ll use HTTP in the way it was intended: accessing and linking resources at a more basic level, using the HTTP methods GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE as a complete, fully-functional language for accessing those resources. Database people inherently understand and respect this access pattern better than many programmers working in traditional programming languages like C# and Java. After all, we’re accustomed to using four basic methods to manipulate data in our databases: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. Yet, as database people, we also know that giving software developers strict table-level access can cause all sorts of performance problems. For those situations, where you know that some complex database operation could be performed much more efficiently with a bit of T-SQL code, a stored procedure or a view may be just the prescription your developers need. Hopefully, this article has helped you understand how to invoke programmatic resource in a SQL Azure database and perhaps it will help you along the way to making the correct architectural choices in the design of your modern, data-driven web applications.