Interact with data and processes by using the Dataverse Web API

API is not a new concept, but in the modern computer world, it is the popular way of communication between applications. An API is a component that allows different platforms, applications, and systems to connect and share information with each other. Developers use this component to improve their products/software by accessing other business data, software, services or code. Most of the benefits of an API are that it is easy to use in code and allows access to resources with control manners.

Web API is basically an Open-Source framework that is used to write HTTP APIs.

In the Dataverse, Microsoft provides different mechanisms to work with data, tables and column definition. Those are below:

• Web API
• Organization Service

Microsoft first introduced this feature in Dynamics CRM 2016 and it uses similarly in the Dataverse?with different programming languages, multiple platforms, and devices. The Web API in Dataverse uses the Open Data Protocol (OData), known as OData version 4.0. OData (Open Data Protocol) is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs.?OData helps to focus on business logic while building RESTFUL APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define:

• Request & Response header
• Status Codes
• HTTP Methods
• URL?
• Media Types
• Payload format
• Query options

OData RESTFUL APIs are easy to consume.

Because Web API is based on REST, we can use it with HTTP in JavaScript or C# with .NET or any other platform or programming language. It can be called and accessed using JavaScript. We can use Web API with HTML web resources, form scripts, and ribbon commands to perform various?operations on data. Web API is very convenient to use with JavaScript as it returns in the form of JSON objects that can be easily converted to JavaScript objects.

Following are the features of Web API:?

• It implements OData version 4.0 for creating and consuming RESTful APIs on rich data sources like DOC, HTML and PDF.?
• It supports a variety of programming languages such as .NET, C++, Java, Python. , device and platform
• ?requests and responses have JSON format

Some of the CRUD operations that Web API provides are:

• Create
• Update
• Delete
• Retrieve
• Retrievemultiple (Using?OData and Fetch)
• Execute Web API functions
• Execute Web API Actions
• Execute Web API Query functions

Limitation of Web API :

• A maximum of 5000 records will be returned for each request.
• If there are more records that match the query filter criteria a @odata.nextlink property with returned with the results
• Web API is not enabled for MS dynamics outlook with offline access while user is offline.
• Can't retrieve unpublished metadata.
• Error when querying self referential Many to Many relationships.
• Null Valued properties may not be returned in expanded navigation property results.