1 Introduction

This wiki describes the SData protocol.

The introduction contains a subsection on terminology and another one on general principles that underpin the design of SData.

The first four sections give general information about the SData protocol and answers the following questions:

• What is the URL syntax?
• What is the payload for SData requests and response?
• What is the metadata format (how does an SData provider expose the structure of the resources to its consumer)?
• How is security handled?

The following sections are centered around the operations exposed by an SData service. They describe how the request should be formed (URL, HTTP headers, payload) and what the service should respond (HTTP status code, HTTP headers, payload). These sections cover functional issues such as error handling, concurrency handling, paging, caching in the contexts where they are relevant.

The following operations are covered:

• Query (returns a collection of resources).
• Read (returns a single resource).
• Create.
• Update.
• Delete.
• Service operation (request/response that does not fit into the CRUD model) and named queries.
• Batch operation.

The last section describes the SData registry that applications can use to discover and register service endpoints.