Ed-Fi Descriptors

Descriptors in the Ed-Fi Data Standard are a set of mechanisms to support flexible enumerations or code tables. Each Descriptor has the following attributes:

[abc]DescriptorId (primary key)^[7]
namespace
codeValue
shortDescription
description
priorDescriptorId
effectiveBeginDate
effectiveEndDate
A map back to an Ed-Fi enumeration value

The GET of a resource must return the namespace and codeValue for Descriptor enumerations. Other components of the Descriptor can be retrieved from the Descriptor resource.

The PUT or POST of a resource must specify the namespace and codeValue for each Descriptor value.

URI Construction and HTTP Verb Usage for Ed-Fi Descriptors

Descriptors are also exposed as Resources of an Ed-Fi REST API and can be accessed and manipulated as follows:

Table 3. Accessing and Manipulating Descriptors

Resource	POST	GET	PUT	DELETE
/[abc]Descriptors	Adds a new Descriptor	Gets all Descriptors for the subtype	Error	Error
/[abc]Descriptors/{id}	Error	Gets all attributes for an individual Descriptor	Updates an individual Descriptor	Deletes an individual Descriptor

Descriptor References

References to a Descriptor value are a URI constructed with the namespace followed by the URL-encoded codeValue:

[namespace]/[codeValue]

For example, to refer to the behaviorDescriptor value in the Ed-Fi namespace with a codeValue of “School Violation,” the reference would be the following URI:

https://www.ed-fi.org/Descriptor/BehaviorDescriptor.xml/School%20Violation

Implementations may provide a default namespace that allows client systems to provide codeValues without the namespace prefix.

⁷Where [abc] is the name of a specific Descriptor.