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    Open API design principles

    High-level design principles related to the open API design

    GP Connect has aligned with NHS England’s Open API Policy to support the ambition of moving to a position where significant business functionality available within systems is exposed through interfaces where the definition is open. Download a PDF copy.

    Core API design principles for GP Connect

    • FHIR API providers to provide a capability statement resource for the server
    • FHIR RESTful API principles to be used by default
      • Synchronous endpoints using GET, POST, PUT and DELETE HTTP verbs
    • FHIR operation APIs to be used in limited ‘set piece’ circumstances - for example, to pull bundles of resources without using the full generic querying syntax
    • Uniform resource identification (URI) as the resource’s logical identity
    • Business identifiers (such as NHS number) used to resolve a resource’s logical identity
    • Resources represented as either XML or JSON as requested by the API consumer. To ensure maximum accessibility, GP Connect is expecting producers to support both formats. However, since XML is on average 30% larger on the wire there is a preference towards use of JSON.
    • HTML content to utilise XHTML in line with the FHIR narrative guidance
    • ETags for managing version-aware updates

    All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated