Working with OData Services
OData (Open Data Protocol) enables applications to expose data or resources as a data service that clients can access within corporate networks and across the Internet. It provides a REST-based protocol for performing create, read, update and delete (CRUD) operations against resources that are exposed as data services.
Integration Server acts as an OData service provider and supports OData version 2.0.
You can use the Service Development perspective in Designer to create OData services. An OData service can be described as an endpoint service that is based on the OData protocol and allows access to data. The OData service exposes an OData entity data model that contains data organized and described in a standard manner.
The OData service consists of a set of entity types, external entity types, and complex types, their properties, and the associations between the entity types. When you create an OData service, Integration Server, acting as an OData service provider, generates the required OData service implementations as flow services that can perform the CRUD operations for each entity type.
These flow services will:
Be located in a folder whose fully qualified name is unique across the entire
Integration Server namespace.
Be named
_insert,
_retrieve,
_update, and
_delete to perform the create, read, update, and delete operations respectively.
Accept certain predefined input parameters that are passed in through the OData request.
Note: | While the services _retrieve, _update, _insert, and _delete might appear to be regular flow services, it is the naming convention and location of the services that instruct Integration Server to treat them as OData service implementations. |
