OData Reference

OData, short for Open Data Protocol, is a set of conventions for building a URL that asks a data source for exactly what you want. Instead of pulling everything and filtering afterward, you filter at the source, so less data travels and your flows run faster. The official specification is dense, so here you'll find my plain-English reference built around the pieces you'll actually use. Microsoft's Power Platform leans on OData heavily, and Power Automate is where most people meet it, usually in a Filter Query field. I walk through the comparison operators one at a time, so you see how the equals and not-equals operators work, how the greater-than and less-than operators handle numbers and dates, and how to combine conditions with the and and or operators. I also cover the functions that make filters powerful, like the "startswith", "endswith", and "date" functions.