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Let's Talk OData, Shall We? And keep it simple

please!
Posted by Shabarish Vijayakumar in SAP for Mobile on Oct 3, 2013 8:21:53 PM
inShare17

The idea of this blog is simple. This blog is an effort to simplify OData and help beginners understand
and start adopting the standard for their development needs.
When I started off with trying to break down and understand OData, I found the internet a big world to
get lost in. If you are one of those, patient enough to read through precise technical details,
then http://www.odata.org will be the best place to learn OData.
In this blog, I will try to summarize OData into a crash course version for those who like me come with
a lazy attitude towards reading online documentation. To keep this a blog easily readable by beginners,
I will try to keep the discussion of OData to 10 short sections that I personally believe is what we need
to know as to get our basics clear.
Note: I will use the various references inline with the odata.org site so that it might be easier for
readers to refer back to the website for further details and keep the context alive.
Lets start with
1. What is OData?
The simplest definition of OData would be that it is a standardized protocol built over existing HTTP
and REST protocols supporting CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations for creating and
consuming data APIs.
Nickname: ODBC for the Web
2. Entity Data Model and an OData metadata
The metadata of an OData message can be summarized as below;

An OData metadata will contain the definition of Entity Sets and the associations. An entity set is
nothing but a collection of Entity Type. An entity type can be considered as a data type that contains
details of a specific type of data ex. Customer, Supplier, Sales Order, Employee etc.
You would have already figured out that an entity key is used to uniquely identify an entity type. Ex.
Employee number, Sales Order number, Product ID etc
Now an association is simply the relationship between two or more entity types. A good example for
association would be Products to its Manufacturer. An entity set Product can be associated with an
entity set Manufacturer in an OData metadata.
A navigation property then is nothing but a property set on an entity type to understand the
associations of the entity type.
3. Access an OData service
We access and OData service via an URI
ex. http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/
4. How do I understand/access the metadata model of the above service?
Add the suffix to the service URI- $metadata
ex. http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/$metadata
5. Lets talk details please!
If we deep dive into the OData service referred earlier, we find that there are four Entity sets i.e Four
different types of data returned by the service.

Now to understand more about this, we will have to look into the metadata and see what information it
reveals.
Below we see how the metadata revels the Entity type to Entity set relationship;

To understand the relation between each of the Entity sets and Entities, refer the below;

The above means that for particular item in the Products Entity set, we can refer its Category or its
Supplier. Similarly for a particular Supplier in the Supplier entity set (Suppliers), we can get a Product
set (Products) and for a particular Product from that set, can further extract it's category.
In the case of Categories, for a Particular Category, we can extract a Product set (Products) related to it
and further also extract the supplier for a specific product.
6. OK, enough with the pictures. Show me the real stuff now!
6.A. How do I access an Entity set?
If you want to access say the Categories entity set, use the URI
- http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Categories
This will return the entire Categories available with the service. You will find three Categories returned,
Food, Beverages and Electronics.
6.B. How do I access a particular entity in an entity set?
You can refer the entity key in the URI to access the particular record. Ex. in the above service for a
specific category, we can refer it with its ID. From the above URI, lets access only the beverages
category. The id for Beverages is 1. So we can use the following URI to access that specific record;
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Categories(1)
Note: How do I know what's the entity key?
In the metadata, for the Entity type definition, you can find the Key referenced. In the case of
Category, it is the field 'ID'.

6.C. Show me an example of the associations and navigation between Categories, Products
and Suppliers.
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Categories(1)/Products(2)/Supplier
The above link can be interpreted as finding the Supplier of Product with ID = 2 within the Categories
entity set with the Category ID as 1.
7. So what are the queries I can use to manipulate the data?
The below table will document the most used and helpful queries when dealing with an OData service;

Query

Description

By default you would have

noticed that the data returned is
in an XML feed. This query
allows us to change the format
of data. The example here
shows how you can return all the
suppliers returned by the service
$format in JSON format instead of XML.

Example

http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Suppliers?
$format=json

$top

This query option helps to limit

the data returned by the service.
The example here shows how
you can return only the 1st
Category instead of all the
Categories.

$skip

This can be treated as the

opposite of $top. The skip
queries can be used to skip
records. The example here
shows how you can skip the first
2 records in the Products set and
return the rest of products.
Hence on the execution of the
given query, Products with ID as
0 and 1 gets skipped.
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?$skip=2

This will return the total number

of records as part of the
response payload. We can
extract the number from the
field <count></count>. If you
execute the given example, in
the payload you will find that in
the field <count>, the value is
returned as 2, meaning there
$inlineco are total 2 Suppliers as part of
unt
the service.
$orderby Use this to sort the records
returned by the service. The
given example shows how to

http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Categories?
$top=1

http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Suppliers?
$inlinecount=allpages
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?
$orderby=Price

Query

Description

Example

sort the Product entity set by the

price of each product. Here Price
is a field returned as part of the
Product set. On use of the query,
the record set is returned with
the ascending order of Price. You
can use a suffix desc to return
the records in the descending
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?
order.
$orderby=Price desc
This I found to be a very helpful
query to reduce the number of
calls we need to make to access
a particular set of data. Say, in
case you want to return all the
products along with their
Category, use the URL provided http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?
$expand in the example.
$expand=Category

$filter

This can be compared to the

'where' query in SQL. Lets say
we want to get all the products
with rating greater than 3, then
use the example as defined
here. Note that we can use both
Logical and Arithmetic
operators. There are also various
functions like substring etc that
is supported. Please refer
this link for the extensive list
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?
that you can use.
$filter=Rating gt 3
As in any SQL query, this query
option can be used to Select
specific or all fields of an Entity
set or entity. A simple example,
lets say the requirement for
which is for us to return the
fields rating and Price of a
Product with ID = 3

$select

Note: I found that it is not

possible to use $select on
Complex types. For example,
the Address is a complex type in
the Entity Supplier. So if we
want to say, select the City and
State which are the fields part of
the Address structure, the
$select is not supported. (Or am http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products(3)?
I struggling to use it correctly?) $select=Rating,Price

More examples,
a. Get me the three of the best rated products
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?$top=3&$orderby=Rating desc
b. Ok! Now get me the next three best rated products.

http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?$top=3&$skip=3&$orderby=Rating desc
c. Get me the count of Products with the Price greater than or equal to 20?
http://services.odata.org/OData/OData.svc/Products?$inlinecount=allpages&$filter=Price ge 20
8. Instead of a browser, are there any tools I can use to play around with OData?
Yes. One simple tool is the Advanced REST Client for Chrome. There are also many other clients
available online for free which help you.
9. What was all the CRUD thing about?
In case of OData, CRUD operations are defined as POST (Create), GET (Read), PUT (Update) and Delete
(Delete) HTTP methods.
You can do a GET and POST request on an Entity Set while GET, PUT and DELETE can be done on an
Entity.

10. This is all good but why OData instead of normal REST?
Well, you have seen how OData provides you with a consistent uniform standard way of describing the
data and the data model. That precisely gives it an edge over REST. Moreover, hey SAP seems to be
investing heavily on the standard. Which might mean, like it or not, you will eventually end up using
OData
Hope this was an enjoyable read. Please do leave a feedback or comment on anything you wish to see
changed or added additionally.