Overview

Metadata is crucial for delivering data products that users can easily understand, and knowledge about the returned data can quickly turn 1's and 0's into information consumers can understand. RDS has the ability to return the knowledge, or metadata, along side the data that is selected. Variable names, labels, descriptions and much more can be accessed in the same query as the data. 

Step By Step

• To access the metadata for a query we will begin with a simple select query.

• Add the "metadata" parameter to the query

  Code Block
  title Retrieving Metadata
  http://{host}/rds/catalog/{collection}/{view}/select?metadata

• This will return the data along with variable and classification metadata for any variable specified by the select query.