We’ve listened to our customers and received many requests for the ability to track changes to education resources. We are pleased to announce that the Assignments API in Microsoft Graph now supports delta queries for certain education resource types such as educationAssignment and educationCategory. This update has been rolled out to the beta endpoint.

What are delta queries?

Delta queries give applications the ability to query newly created or updated entities without having to perform a full read of the entire collection – essentially a GET changes API.

For education resources, that means an API caller can issue a delta query to get newly created or updated assignments, including submission resource changes, without the need to issue multiple GET assignments API calls.

This allows an application to proactively monitor changes and efficiently track and get state changes. Consider an application that needs to cache or store data locally, and keep that data up to date, or track changes to data for any other reasons. The benefits of using these new GET calls include:

• Minimizes duplication – no need to retrieve data an application already has
• Minimizes network traffic – smaller payloads and fewer roundtrip requests
• Reduce throttling likelihood – reduces the likelihood of reaching a throttling threshold
• Better application performance – reduction in call latencies and fewer roundtrip requests

Additional resources

For more information and examples, see the following topics:

• Delta query overview
• Tutorial: Use Change Notifications and Track Changes with Microsoft Graph
• Delta query API: educationAssignment
• Delta query API: educationCategory

Happy coding!