Best Practice - Performance and Optimization for API Clients

Recommendation

API clients should minimize API transactions and reduce network traffic.

Reasoning

This set of best practices will help to ensure scalability of API hosts by focusing on efficiency of integrations. They will minimize unnecessary data transfers, data churn, and network overhead and thereby also reduce costs. Since API implementation can be shared resources, these can also reduce overall latency time or similar complications for the entire vendor community transacting with the API.

Implementation

• Use a multi-threading strategy​ for API transaction management.

• Avoid excessive resyncing by providing the ability to:​

  • Resync single records that have previously failed.

  • Resync by single API resource (e.g., all sections, all staff)

  • Resync by single API resource over a time period (e.g., attendance records for yesterday)​

• Demonstrate that the primary behavior is to update records in place using POST/PUT rather than DELETE/POST​

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