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What is OData?

OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. OData helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc. OData also provides guidance for tracking changes, defining functions/actions for reusable procedures, and sending asynchronous/batch requests.

OData RESTful APIs are easy to consume. The OData metadata, a machine-readable description of the data model of the APIs, enables the creation of powerful generic client proxies and tools.

Learn about how to get started with some of our tutorials below!

Begin Learning

The Fundamentals: Understand OData in 6 Steps

This overview of OData fundamentals captures the most representative scenarios of OData and REST. It has detailed descriptions of the scenarios and has sample code snippets on different programming platforms to showcase how an OData-based RESTful API can be consumed.

Topics: requesting, querying, and adding data

Tutorial Pt. I: The Basics

This tutorial walks brand-new developers in more detail through the basics of requesting, querying, and modifying resources in an OData service. Since OData defines best practices for REST APIs, this tutorial will feel a lot like documentation you might read for a custom REST API -- but you can apply the principles you learn here to all OData APIs.

Topics: requesting, querying, and modifying data

Tutorial Pt. II: Advanced Concepts

This tutorial will continue the lesson by introducing more advanced concepts related to working with more complex and specialized types. As with the basic tutorial, all of the principles in the advanced tutorial can be applied to any OData API.

Topics: dynamic types, type inheritance, batch requests

Interactive Tutorial via Postman

Do you prefer to learn by doing? This Postman tutorial will walk you through more than 20 real OData requests and responses. The tutorial is designed to use the TripPin reference service, but again, the principles here can be applied to any OData API.

Topics: requesting, querying, and adding data

Next Steps