Overview

The metadata in Bob represents the properties of data fields and lists. The properties include the field's type, category and id, helping you to learn how to process the data it contains.

Use the Metadata endpoints to:

Read fields and custom fields properties.
Read and update lists and list-items.
Read out-of-the-box table columns properties.
Read custom tables properties.

Learn more about using Fields and lists metadata

Notes:

The Fields metadata endpoint retrieves fields and table columns representing employee data. This includes "current" data from historical tables, such as columns from the "effective" entry in the Work table.

Fields returned by the Fields metadata can be accessed using the Search for employees endpoint, except for the 'Actual Payments' table, which should be accessed via the Search for actual payments endpoint.

Required Permissions

Ensure you enable the following permissions for the service user calling the API.

Action	Permissions
Get fields/lists	No permissions required
Create/delete fields	Features > Settings > Employee fields > Manage Employee Field Settings
Add/ delete items from a list	Features > People > Edit all lists (sites, job titles, etc.)

To learn more about permissions, see Setting permissions to Service Users.

Rate limiting

Rate limits are restrictions that our API imposes on the number of times a user can access our endpoints within a specified period of time. To learn more about rate limiting best practices, see Rate limiting.

Below is a table detailing the rate limits for each endpoint in the Onboarding endpoints.

Method	Endpoint	Limit per minute
GET	Get all company fields	50
POST	Create a new field	10
PUT	Update an existing field	10
DELETE	Delete an existing field	10
GET	Get all company lists	50
GET	Get a specific company list by name	50
POST	Add a new item to an existing list	10
PUT	Update an existing item from a list	10
DELETE	Delete an item from an existing list	10