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  1. OASIS Open Data Protocol (OData) TC
  2. ODATA-199

$expand should be allowed to return only ids for already seen objects

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    Details

    • Type: Improvement
    • Status: Closed
    • Priority: Minor
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • Affects Version/s: V4.0_WD01
    • Fix Version/s: V4.0_WD01
    • Component/s: ATOM Format, JSON Format
    • Labels:
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    • Environment:

      [Proposed]

      Description

      Today, specifying $expand may return the same item multiple times. For example, if the someone is really popular, selecting ~people/$expand=friends may return the same friend for multiple people. This can lead to payload bloat when attempting to select a graph of related entities.

      A simple means of compression would be to allow the service to return only the id of related entities that have already been returned within a feed. This would work nicely for existing clients that track incoming entities as they generally already have logic to merge with or simply return previously retrieved objects.

      We might consider a preference to allow the client to request whether or not duplicate ids are returned in full, and pick a default behavior for the service if the client doesn't specify a preference. We could use the defined return=minimal for this; currently this is used in PUT/POST to say don't return results if they haven't changed, but are undefined for a GET operation in OData.

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            • Assignee:
              Unassigned
              Reporter:
              mikep Michael Pizzo
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              • Created:
                Updated:
                Resolved: