API Design Guidelines

An API is essentially an interface used by programmers to support communication between systems. Guidelines are useful because the REST architectural style allows for a great deal of flexibility in design. The guidelines that follow are designed to make Ed-Fi API implementations intuitive and easy to use for programmers.

This section covers the following topics in detail:

• Resources
  • Validation of Natural and Foreign Keys
• Discovery API
• Ed-Fi Descriptors
• REST API Conventions
  • Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
  • Data Strictness
  • POST Requests
  • GET Requests
  • PUT Requests
  • DELETE Requests