OpenEdge Development: Mobile Applications - Product ...

Chapter 3: Creating Mobile Services
Using a REST client to invoke a Mobile operation
Once you have constructed the correct URI for the REST resource that represents a
given Mobile operation, you can specify it as part of the HTTP request to invoke the
operation from a REST client, such as Postman. However, a REST client requires four
basic pieces of information to send an HTTP request:
• URI — As described in the previous section
• Media type — Always application/json for Mobile operations
• HTTP method — As specified for each Mobile operation:
– Create — POST
– Read — GET
– Update — PUT (with no op-element in the URI—see previous section)
– Delete — DELETE
– Invoke — PUT (for all invoke operations, each of which is identified and
distinguished from the others by the name of the implementing ABL routine
specified as the op-element in the URI—see previous section)
• Other HTTP request components — Especially other INPUT parameters to
include in the body of the HTTP request
Note that, other than the filter parameter that is passed as the op-element in the
URI of a Mobile read operation request (see previous section), all other INPUT (and the
input side of INPUT-OUTPUT) parameters passed to the implementing ABL routines for
Mobile operations are passed in the body of the HTTP request. This includes the JSON
object for an INPUT-OUTPUT temp-table or ProDataSet parameter that is passed for the
Mobile create, update, and delete operations, and a JSON object with properties for
passing the values of any INPUT and INPUT-OUTPUT parameters for Mobile invoke
operations.
For the REST client, the input JSON objects specified for relational data must conform
to the structure defined by OpenEdge for passing the JSON representations of
temp-tables and ProDataSets, as appropriate. For more information, see OpenEdge
Development: Working with JSON. Note that this structure is similar to the structure
used to return the data for a Mobile read operation (GET). For an invoke operation, the
property names in the simple JSON object must have the same case-sensitive names
as the corresponding parameters defined in the implementing ABL routines.
Note also that for the Mobile create, update, and delete operations, all of which have
the same type of input JSON object for relational data, only the HTTP method specified
for the HTTP request distinguishes one Mobile operation from the other.
86 OpenEdge ® Development: Mobile Applications