Open Dental

For doing reads from Open Dental, we've been primarily using Queries PUT ShortQuery but we recently came across a use case where we will need a large amount of records from Open Dental and paging 100 records at a time would not be a workable solution. Given that, we were looking at implementing an SFTP server and Queries POST but wanted to check to make sure we're not missing another option for reading large data sets with custom queries in the OD API. For example, is there an option where we can request the file and avoid the need for the SFTP server?

Thank you!

Good afternoon,

You are correct that there are two ways to run custom queries via the API:

1. Queries PUT ShortQuery - As you mentioned, limits results to 100 rows (or 1000 rows in Local and Service API modes)
2. Queries POST - Does not limit the rows returned. However this does require you setup an SFTP site to receive this data

Out of curiosity, what is your use case that paging with the ShortQuery endpoint is not a workable solution?

SLeon, we can page with ShortQuery but some of our clients have very large databases and some of the tables could cause us to have to page dozens of times. Technically feasible and not an issue on our end but we wouldn't want to overwhelm the customer instance of Open Dental and we also have to plan for the worst-case scenario where a customer's internet or computer may not be very powerful.