Business Scenario
Your company is planning to develop a set of web-based applications. Open Data Protocol (OData) is intended to be used for data access as a standardized access protocol that meets the requirements of modern Web development.
Overview
The OData is a data access protocol built on core protocols like HTTP and commonly accepted methodologies like REST (Representational State Transfer) for the web. Thus, as common practices of REST, OData builds on HTTP, AtomPub, and JSON using URIs to address and access data feed resources.
Key Challenges in Enterprise Computing for Business Consumers
OData Service
OData currently supports two formats for representing the resources it exposes:
- the XML-based AtomPub and
- the JSON formats
JSON has significantly less protocol overhead than the Atom Publishing protocol. JSON can easily be consumed with JavaScript and by SAPUI5.
Each OData service is represented by a URI, called the service root URI. A URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is a uniform resource identifier, which is a string of characters used to identify a resource. More precisely, each resource can be accessed using a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a uniform resource locator, describing how to access the resource. This type of identification enables interaction with representations of the resource across a network using specific protocols like OData.
Types of documents associated with each OData service
CRUD Operations
Conceptually, OData is a way of performing database-style create, read, update, and delete operations on resources by using HTTP verbs:
- GET: Get the resource (a collection of entities, a single entity, a structural property, and so on).
- POST: Create a new resource.
- PUT: Update an existing resource by replacing it with a complete instance.
- PATCH: Update an existing resource by replacing part of its properties with a partial instance.
- DELETE: Remove the resource.
OData API
An Application Programming Interface (API) allows you to access data, for example, monitoring data.
The OData API is implemented as a REST API and the technical protocol is OData. This means that you can use standard HTTP methods (for example, the GET method) to call the API.
Summary
You now have a more profound understanding of the OData protocol, and also you can explain why it is so useful in modern web development.
