What do you understand by Open Data Protocol?

The OData (Open Data) Protocol is an application-level protocol for interacting with data via restful interfaces. OData helps us to focus on our business logic while building restful APIs without having to worry about various approaches to defining request and response headers, status codes, media types, HTTP methods, query options, URL conventions, payload formats, etc. OData also provides guidance for tracking changes, defining functions for reusable procedures, and sending asynchronous requests.

OData Restful APIs are easy to consume. The OData metadata, the i.e. machine-readable desk of the data model enables the creation of powerful generic client proxies and tools.

Overview
OData is an OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for developing and consuming restful APIs. The protocol supports the description of data models and the editing and querying of data according to these models.

This will provide facilities such as:
-Metadata: A machine-readable description of the data model exposed by the particular data provider.
-Data: Set of data entities and the relationships between the entities.
-Query: Requesting that the service performs a set of filtering and other transformations to its data to give the results.
-Editing: Creating, Editing, or Deleting data.
-Operations: Invoking the Custom logic.
-Vocabulary: Attaching Custom Semantics.

Principles of OData:
The OData Protocol is very different from other Rest API approaches. It provides a uniform way to describe both data and the data model. This will improve semantic interoperability between systems and allow the ecosystem to emerge.

The Principles are as follows:
– OData prefers mechanisms that work on a variety of data stores. In particular, do not assume a relational data model.
– Services should be able to support extended functionality without breaking any clients who are unaware of those extensions and hence Extensibility is important.
-Following REST principles.
-OData should build incrementally. A very basic need should be easy to build, with additional work necessary only to support any additional capabilities,
-Keep it simple. Address the common cases and provide extensibility.

Architecture:
Open Data Protocol is a protocol for the creation and consumption of Restful APIs.The common practice of Rest is OData builds on HTTP, AtomPub, and JSON using URIs to address and access data feed resources.

Resource identification: To identify resources, OData uses URIs. For every OData service, the service root is abbreviated as → http://host/service/.

The service document: The service document lists all entity sets, functions, and singletons that can be retrieved. Clients can use this service document to navigate the model in a hypermedia-driven fashion for ease.

The metadata document: The metadata document describes its types, function, and actions. Clients can use metadata documents to understand how to query the data and interact with entities for the service.

Dynamic Resources: The URIs for dynamic resources may be computed from hypermedia information in the service document and metadata document.

Resource operation:
– GET: Getting the resource (Collection of entities (or Single )).
– POST: Creating a new resource for the table.
– PUT: Updating an existing resource into a complete instance.
– PATCH: Updating an existing resource by replacing part of the properties with a partial instance.
– DELETE: Deleting the resource.

Resource representation:
OData uses different formats for representing the data and the data model. In Odata, JSON format is the standard way of representing data, with an Atom format still being in the committee specification stage. For representing the data model, the CSDL (common schema definition Language) defines an XML representation of the entity data model exposed by OData services that are used.

.NET Libraries for OData
>Core Libraries
-ODataLib , namespace = Microsoft.OData.core .It contains classes to serialize, deserialize or validate OData JSON payload.
 -EdmLib , namespace= Microsoft.OData.Edm. It contains classes to represent, construct, parse, serialize, or validate entity data models.
-Microsoft.Spatial , namespace = Microsoft.Spatial. It contains methods and classes that facilitate geometry spatial operations and geography.

>Web API OData, namespace = System.Web.OData. It contains everything that you need to create OData endpoints using ASP.NET Web API to support OData query syntax for your web API.

>Restier, namespace Microsoft.Restier. Restier is a Restful API development framework for building standardized, OData-based Restful services on.NET platform. It can be seen as the middleware on top of the web API OData. Restier provides facilities to bootstrap an OData service like what WCF Data services do, besides this, it supports adding the business logic in several simple steps that are flexible and easily customizable like OData do. It also supports adding additional publishers to support other protocols and additional providers to support other data sources.
>OData Client for.Net, namespace=Microsoft.OData.Client. It contains LINQ-enables client APIs for issuing OData queries and consuming OData JSON payloads.

Get in touch with the top web development services provider for more details and information.