Overview of OData Activities

OData (Open Data Protocol) allows the creation and consumption of queryable and interoperable RESTful APIs in a simple and standard way. It is an OASIS standard that defines the best practice for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats and query options.

App Connect supports exposing data from back end systems as OData APIs. Only GET and DELETE methods are supported in this version which means external clients can make GET and DELETE calls to OData API running on App Connect. The version of OData supported is 4.0.

OData activities work in conjunction with HTTP/ReST activities in App Connect. That means the output of the HTTP activities is given as input to OData activity and then the output of the OData activity is passed back as input to the HTTP activities.

App Connect supports two OData activities:

• Read OData: Takes input the URL information, payload, http headers and query parameters and gives the output in XML format. This XML output is used to perform the business logic on the backend systems involving CRUD operations using connector activities.
• Write OData: Takes input the business data which is created as part of the business logic execution and serializes into OData format (XML or JSON)