Questions Using JSON with OData in Acumatica

By default, the OData format used by Acumatica is Atom in XML which is pretty wordy and verbose. JSON is A LOT cleaner.

Here is an example of the regular OData output from Acumatica:

Note that the only stuff I care about is the actual data which is highlighted in red, but there is a lot of other "junk" in there too:

The screenshot above came from the following URL:
https://acumaticademo.aktion.com/Acumatica2018R1/OData/Demo%20Company/Test1

But you can add a parameter to the end of the URL to get back JSON instead of Atom like this:
https://acumaticademo.aktion.com/Acumatica2018R1/odata/Demo%20Company/Test1?$format=json

The JSON format is a lot cleaner which means that there is A LOT less data that needs to flow across the pipe.

The JSON format looks like this:

Thanks to Vlad and Vladimir for teaching me this over on StackOverflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52612875/acumatica-odata-as-json-instead-of-atom/52622804#52622804

Final note, if you want to connect to the JSON version of OData in Acumatica from Excel, you can't use the normal From Other Sources -> From OData Feed option pictured below:

Instead, you have to use this From Other Sources -> From Web option:

Just paste the URL that has the extra JSON parameter in it:

Then authenticate using Basic and your Acumatica credentials like your would normally do with OData:

Next, you have to go through a few manual gyrations to get the data in the format that you are expecting:

Note in the most recent screenshot above that the JSON format is not as "smart" as the regular OData format. Everything defaults to text and you'll have to do additional work to format things like dates.

But this is a good option for when the normal OData format is running slowly because the JSON format seems to me to be less than 50% of the size so in theory it should be more than 50% faster.