Best Practices
Jeff Putnam
Stephen Fuqua
Nathan Gandomi
Eric Jansson
The Ed-Fi Alliance has tracked best practices to identify those that are important in developing and maintaining an efficient Ed-Fi-based data exchange between IT systems in the K12 enterprise.
Note: items in this section are under review for inclusion as part of certification testing of products beginning in calendar 2025 and targeted at school year 2025-26.
These areas include:
Information in this section makes specific recommendations for product vendors in development of API clients.
Discovery API
API Design guidelines and recommendations are provided by the Ed-Fi Alliance because the REST architecture style allows for a great deal of flexibility in design. Discovery API (formerly known as "version endpoint") should be used by API clients to discover information about the Data Model available at a particular URL and to discover details about the implementation. The Discovery API provides essential metadata about the application version, supported data models, and URLs for additional metadata, aiding in client-server interactions. Note: these guidelines may be considered for inclusion in future certification requirements but are not currently under review for inclusion in certification testing for school year 2025-26.
See the full specification and discussion for Discovery API here.