Odata Overview
Contents
What is OData?
OData is described in the following article: Wikipedia article.
OData provides clients with the ability to publish their data to their communities. It's as if each clients has their own API for their own communities. For example, a client can expose their annual grant/funding information so tax payers can retrieve in real time data for further analysis.
How does it work
SmartSimple provides OData V2, V3 and V4 services.
These can be consumed by OData clients such as MS Excel, MS SQL server, SaleForce, or used though another API such as .NET.
SmartSimple Entities Exposed to OData Services
Currently Reports are the only entities exposed through Odata. In the future other entities may be added. Reports were chosen for the following reasons:
- Easier to control security and data format such as fields and fieldname
- Most clients wish to consume read only data
- Data relationships are handled in SmartSimple, the external client does not need to understand underlying data relationships
- Easy to implement as there is no need to configure OData service and metadata endpoints (as required by the OData protocol), these are automatically handled by the SmartSimple Report Engine
- Greater flexible as the SmartSimple user is able to create dummy tables (similar to SQL views) by combining tables, applying formulas and aggregations
- Filtering and ordering are pre-defined in SmartSimple Report, eliminate SQL injection vulnerability
OData Services Endpoints
Depending on the version of the OData required the endpoint will vary.
Version 4: https://mysmartsimpleurl/OData/V4/424623/Service.svc/
Version 3: https://mysmartsimpleurl/OData/V3/424623/Service.svc/
Version 2: https://mysmartsimpleurl/OData/V2/424623/Service.svc/
How to setup OData from within SmartSimple
1. Create a new user and set access to "web access"
2. Set a password 3. Edit report in neo builder and enable OData checkBox
4. Done How to connect from Salesforces ? I will add more details with screen shots How to connect from MSExcel ?
I will add more details with screen shots