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RAPID and OData

RAPID Profile is a subset of the conventions defined in OData that can be applied to any RESTful API. A RAPID service can easily support generic OData V4 clients by:

RAPID services MAY support any additional conventions defined in the OData specification. RAPID services SHOULD

Support OData canonical key syntax​

Services SHOULD support the OData parens key syntax as an alternate syntax.

GET http://rapid-pro.org/company/employees(2)

To be interoperable with OData clients, RAPID services that do not support the above OData key convention MUST include an @id property whose string value is a URL that can be used to retrieve the resource.

Support $ prefix for built-in query options​

In addition to the "friendly" query option names filter, orderby, select, ... services SHOULD also support the $-prefixed versions $filter, $orderby, $select, ... with the same semantics.

Support qualified action and function names​

In addition to "short" action and function names services SHOULD also support namespace-qualified action and function names, for example

POST http://rapid-pro.org/company/employees/1/youreFired
POST http://rapid-pro.org/company/employees/1/enterprise.youreFired

where enterprise is the schema namespace that defines the youreFired action.

Support XML resource description​

To support generic OData V4 clients, RAPID services SHOULD provide their resource description at /$metadata (also) in XML format according to OData V4 CSDL XML.

Following OData conventions for OData V4 Clients​

A RAPID service determines that a request is from a generic OData V4 client by looking for any of the following:

  • An OData-MaxVersion header
  • An OData-Version header
  • An Accept or Content-Type header with a value of application/json suffixed with an OData-specific format parameter