General Request Construction

For all Ed-Fi REST API transactional requests and responses, JSON must be the default format. If a media-type header is not provided, “application/json” is presumed. Alternate packet formats may also be supported.

Resource Collections and Individual Resources

For each resource, there are two base forms for the URI: one for a collection of resources and the other for a specific resource in the collection. The collection form for the URI is referred to by the pluralized name of the individual resource. A specific resource is referenced by the collection name, followed by a slash and the resource’s unique identifier. For example:

/students refers to a collection of students
/students/ffc0…a272 refers to a specific student with an assigned identifier of “ffc0…a272”

Associated Resources

A collection of resources associated with another resource may be referenced in a single URI, using the pattern associatedResource/{id}/resource. The collection to be returned must be the rightmost resource. For example:

/schools/abc7…123f/studentSchoolAssociations/students refers to the collection of Students associated with a specific School

URI Construction and HTTP Verb Usage for Individual Records and Transactions

Individual record and transaction URIs in an Ed-Fi REST API take a convention-based approach to construction and HTTP verb usage.

Table 2. Example of Convention-Based Approach to Construction

Resource	POST	GET	PUT/PATCH	DELETE
/students	Adds a new Student	Gets a collection of Students	Error	Error
/students/{id}	Error	Gets an individual Student	Updates an individual Student	Deletes an individual Student
/students/{id}/section	Error	Gets a collection of Sections associated with a specific Student	Error	Error