Resource Format

Overview

The goal of this document is to define extra requirements on the data returned by the RESTful service to enable reporting, details about resources in specific domain will be described in specification for each domain separately.

Resource request and response

A reporting consumer will construct a query to the service provider, and then consume data in the query resultset. Details about the query request and overall structure of the response will be covered in resource query sessions.

Identifying properties in the resultset

A reporting consumer will use knowledge acquired from the resource schema to identify data in the resultset and map to internal data model in the reporting system.

That means, for a service provider, in order to expose data in a way that can be identified as separate property in reporting system, the data SHOULD be uniquely identifiable in the resulset with knowledge acquired from the resource schema.

Take a concrete example:

If there is a piece of XML in the resultset like this:

<attribute>

    <name>att1</name>

    <value>value1</value>

</attribute>

<attribute>

    <name>att2</name>

    <value>value2</value>

</attribute>  

And assuming the resource schema is XML Schema.

In this case, the reporting system won't be able to map "attribute"s with "name" to be "att1" as one property and map "attribute"s with "name" as "att2" to be another property in the reporting system.

Extracting data from the resultset

The reporting consumer should be able to extract real content for the properties from the resultset directly. That means, the service provider should return real content for properties in the resultset and the reporting consumer shouldn't be forced to follow URLs to retrieve real content for properties.

Identifier for resource

In the resultset, each resource MUST have a identifier which can uniquely identify this resource globally.

Choices for identifier:

1. URI for the resource

... (other choices?)

Resource links

Multi-valued properties

Comments

Add your comments here:

-- XiangDongHu - 03 Nov 2009