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2.9 Intermediate URLs

URLs are hierarchical by nature. Previous pages describe terminal URLs that correspond to resource collections, resources, service operations, schemas, etc. Terminal URLs are the primary URLs that an SData consumer uses to interact with a provider. But a consumer may also try to access intermediate URLs such as:

http://www.example.com/sdata
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod/$service
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod/accounts/$service
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod/accounts/$queries

An SData provider SHOULD support GET operations on these URLs. If so, it MUST respond with an Atom feed that lists the branches available at the intermediate level of the URL hierarchy. The entries of the returned feed SHOULD be tagged with Atom categories so that the consumer can find out if the entries describe collection URLs, single resource URLs, service operation URLs, etc.

The following table gives an overview of the feeds returned by these intermediate URLs, as well as the categories that the provider should use to tag the feed and its entries (see SData Scheme section):

URL	Feed Content	Feed-level Category	Entry-level Category
http://www.example.com/sdata	Lists applications.	Provider	Application
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp	Lists contracts supported by the myApp application.	Application	Contract
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract	Lists datasets available for the myApp/myContract contract.	Contract	Dataset
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod	Lists resource collections exposed by the prod dataset for the test contract	Dataset	Collection
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod/$service	Lists service operations exposed by the prod dataset for the test contract.	Service	Operation
http://www.example.com/sdata/myApp/myContract/prod/accounts/$queries	Lists named queries exposed by the accounts resource kind.	Queries	Query

SData providers SHOULD support these URLs. There may nevertherless be constraints that prevent them from implementing the topmost intermediate URLs. For example, in a Tomcat deployment, it is likely that every contract will be handled by a different servlet. Then, the contract servlet should be able to list the datasets but there will not be any servlet to list the contracts. In this scenario, intermediate URLs will only be supported at the contract level and below.

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