anonymous access and listdata.svc

Question

We are trying to use an ajax call to get list data for an anonymous site. We are using this on our intranet site and it works well. We build an html file that calls the list service (via ajax) and we populate a placeholder tag on the page. All the html files are stored in the siteassets folder and are easy to maintain.

Now I have a public facing site that I would like to do the same. However, my ajax call is returning a 400 Bad Request in Firefox as anonymously. The same page works like a dream if logged in.

I have searched and found lots of pages saying that this cannot be done, however, I have not seen a solution or alternate way to do this without using a sandboxed solution.

If there a way to do this other than sandboxed?

Answer 1

Listdata.svc service usage requires an authenticated connection. For your public site, I do recommend implement your custom service (be it a simple asmx service, rest service, wcf service) or create a custom generic handler (eg: listdata.ashx) that will return, in a similar fashion to what you would receive from listdata.svc the expected content.

You can safely craft any CAML queries returning whatever you need in your service layer and sending back as JSON / XML ready to be consumed without the limitation of the mandatary authenticated connection from the listdata.svc service layer.