Example: Creating a Student

Putting the pieces in the above sections together, we can look at the contents of a sample transaction.

Below is an example of atransaction made by a Student Information System to create a student.

Request

POST "https://ed-fi.grandbend.edu:443/v5.1.0/api/data/v3/ed-fi/students" 
accept: application/json 
Content-Type: application/json
authorization: Bearer 20ea10c525354cdaa32aacfb71bc2ff8
{
    "studentUniqueId": "6048999",
    "birthDate": "2009-07-22",
    "firstName": "Julie",
    "lastSurname": "Martinez",
    "middleName": "Macon"
}

In this example, you can see that this is a POST operation, so is creating a new Student API resource. There is an authorization token in the HTTP header ("Bearer 20ea10c525354cdaa32aacfb71bc2ff8"), and then the actual contents of the new Student record, in JSON format.

Try it out

You can paste this JSON into the API Swagger interface for the /student API resource and run it – see the section Online API Documentation and Sandbox - Student Equity-VDG and follow the instructions to authorize and try it out.

A response from the API sent back would look like is as follows:

Response

201
access-control-allow-origin: * 
access-control-expose-headers: * 
connection: keep-alive 
content-length: 0 
date: Wed07 Apr 2021 17:21:27 GMT 
etag: "5249220147305124204" 
location: https://api.ed-fi.org:443/data/v3/ed-fi/students/918bb778138b4ab2a44e599fbcbf7f66

This is an empty response with only HTTP headers and no body message (a few headers have been removed to allow us to focus on the ones most important to our discussion).

The 201 code indicates that the request was successful and the API resource was created.
The location field returns the resource ID for the new entity – in this case: 918bb778138b4ab2a44e599fbcbf7f66. A GET request to /ed-fi/students/918bb778138b4ab2a44e599fbcbf7f66 would return the entity that was just created.
Other elements – such as an ETag and timestamp – are also provided. Generally these are not needed by most applications.

Example: Creating a Discipline Incident

Adding a disciplineIncident would look as follows. Note the references in this element to another element: schoolReference. The School element must have been previously submitted, using the same pattern shown above for Student. If the School does not exist in the API, the transaction will fail.

POST "https://ed-fi.grandbend.edu:443/v5.1.0/api/data/v3/ed-fi/disciplineIncident" 
accept: application/json 
Content-Type: application/json
authorization: Bearer 20ea10c525354cdaa32aacfb71bc2ff8 
{
    "schoolReference": {
      "schoolId": 255901107
    },
    "incidentIdentifier": "155654",
    "incidentDate": "2021-02-09",
    "incidentLocationDescriptor": "uri://ed-fi.org/IncidentLocationDescriptor#Auditorium",
    "incidentTime": "10:30:00",
    "behaviors": [
      {
        "behaviorDescriptor": "uri://ed-fi.org/BehaviorDescriptor#School Code of Conduct"
      }
    ]
  }