What exactly is Metadata API. I heard this terms many times but I am still not able to understand the concept of it.
I know how to create API in java or javascript but Many times I have been told to explore Metadata API of the application but still I am not able to understand.
Can somebody give an example for the same? is there any public metadata API available?
When working with data many times you have to interact with large databases with many fields. For example if you work with Google Analytics the reporting tool talks to many databases with hundreds of different fields and columns of these databases. Different timestamps for your data, encodings, types, logs, content, xml configurations, etc. Each of these database columns has its own format and since there are so many, it is practically impossible for a human to remember all the exact syntax and parameters for each of these fields.
For this reason we build an application interface (API) to access these types of information (metadata). This metadata API can help you better understand what data is suitable for your application and how you can interact with the database to retrieve it.
Here is a response from a metadata API from Google Analytics. There you can see what type of info the endpoint is expecting from you to submit in order to retrieve a valid response.
Here is also a link for the overview of the above metadata API.
If you just take the general meaning of Metadata - "data that provides information about other data". You can just think of a Metadata API is an interface that allows you to request data about data and get a response.
An example could be a photo, when a raw photo is taken there is lots of metadata that stores values about exposure, contrast etc.
So a metadata API in this context could be used to interact with that data. It would be classed as a Metadata API because you are not interacting directly with the photo but the data that builds the photo. Does that make sense?
