I have leveraged the REST service using listdata.svc many times. However, we are having trouble with one site in particular.  Cannot use REST with it and getting all sorts of errors in Visual Studio. This post is not about VS or C#, however, just about what should be in the REST schema period. I am seeing tons of huge node values when looking at the listdata.svc in a browser.  It appears these are a combination of the list name and the column name.  I didn't think column names showed up at all, just list names?

For example:

<collection 
href="InvestmentPortfolioAnticipatedProjectTeamSizeFTESContractorsCustomersVendorsEtc">
<atom:title>InvestmentPortfolioAnticipatedProjectTeamSizeFTESContractorsCustomersVendorsEtc</atom:title>

I found that Investment Portfolio is a legit list in the site, but the rest of that value is a column name.  Other lists do not have columns listed in this schema when viewing from the browser.  Can someone explain to me why this is happening?

Thanks

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• Edited by Dasani2008 Tuesday, April 28, 2015 7:53 PM

Hi,

If you access http://siteurl/_vti_bin/listdata.svc, the preceding url returns all the lists in XML format. There will be no column name included in a <collection> node for normal lists, except when there is Choice column in this list.

There will be extra <collection> nodes listed as the format below for the lists which contains Choice column:

<collection href="ListnameColumnname">

  <atom:title>ListnameColumnName</atom:title> 

</collection>

It seems this extra <collection> node is for internally use only which is not designed to be exposed to developers.

I would suggest you submit a feedback to the Office Developer Platform if there any expectation about the documentation about SharePoint APIs:

http://officespdev.uservoice.com/

It is a place for customers provide feedback about Microsoft Office products. Whats more, if a feedback is high voted there by other customers, it will be promising that Microsoft Product Team will take it into consideration when designing the next version in the future.

Regards,