John Galt

I really want to use Web API but right now it's broken as in can't ever be used in production broken.

I'm not so sure that's true. We considered having that feature but decided not to support in V1 for a variety of reasons.

John Galt

when someone at MS comes to their senses

Unfortunately we have to consider deadlines, costs, performance and/or security considerations as well as the opportunity cost of implementing this instead of any number of other desirable features when prioritizing work. We certainly have this on the list for vNext.

John Galt

Thoughts on how to do this?

A couple of options. You could use http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.http.valueproviders.valueprefixattribute.prefix(v=vs.108).aspx to work around the '$' in the name issue.

Or, you could write a custom http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.http.filters.actionfilterattribute(v=vs.108).aspx that could read the query string parameter and dynamically modify the IQueryable content value.