Socrata was acquired by Tyler Technologies in 2018 and is now the Data and Insights division of Tyler. The platform is still powered by the same software formerly known as Socrata but you will see references to Data & Insights going forward.

SODA Producer Basics

Heads Up! The ability to modify a dataset requires special permissions.

Introduction

For the tightest possible integration between your source system and your Socrata platform, you’ll want to integrate directly with the SODA Producer API.

Three distinct write methods are available via this RESTful API:

  • Replace: Replace rows in bulk via a PUT operation
  • Upsert: Update rows in bulk via a POST operation
  • Direct Row Manipulation: Add, update, and delete individual rows via PUT, POST, and DELETE operations

Authentication, Application Tokens, and Throttling

To ensure the security of your updates, all write requests to the SODA Producer API should be:

Since these are standard functionalities provided by nearly all HTTP libraries, authentication is easy to set up in almost every popular contemporary programming language.

Row Identifiers

One of the most important concepts to establish before you get started with the SODA Producer API is that of dataset row identifiers. Row identifiers allow both consumers and publishers to uniquely identify individual rows within your dataset, and they allow Socrata to intelligently update your dataset based on those row identifiers.