Core

Motivation and purpose

A clear and concise definition of SData is one of the primary goals for the 2.0 version.

The SData standard is a comprehensive specification capable of handling even the most complex business cases that might require synchronization, paging, discoverability, etc. In the past, teams building SData providers believed they had to implement everything mentioned in the SData 1.x standard, even features not required by their particular business case. In some instances this lead to the perception that building an SData provider was more difficult to create than it was really the case.

SData 2.0 can be viewed as a web toolkit consisting of a small set of required core features and many optional features that solve frequently encountered problems. This document will capture and define the small number of core features that make up the ‘SData 2.0 core’.

In addition to clarifying and simplifying the standard, this document also introduces JSON as a new optional format for SData payloads. JSON is ideally suited to some business cases like mobility because it’s less verbose then ATOM/XML. This document will not provide a complete JSON specification but it will compare and contrast JSON and ATOM formats defined in SData 2.0.

Aims

This paper designates and describes the central aspects of SData, yielding the ‘core’ of the specification. The document does not contain the official text of the core itself - it points out the fundamentals, leaving the global community presentation of the topics open for future work.

This document will:

• Identify the SData 2.0 fundamental aspects and establish the relation to their counterparts in the 1.x version of the standard
• Re-define compliance levels(MUST/SHOULD/MAY) on core aspects
• Deprecate outdated features or solutions