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Aeries - CALPADS Flash 221 Response

In light of the information contained in CALPADS Update Flash #221 dated April 8, 2022, here are some suggestions from Aeries regarding potential workflows to help mitigate the unintended consequences of the changes announced so far as part of the Post Process Redevelopment Project by the CDE. Aeries will continue to communicate our concerns directly to CDE and work with them to find the best workarounds for our customers in this fluid situation. 

New SSID Assignment Process:

As a reminder, the only Aeries extract that contains a blank SSID field is the SSID Request extract, located on the Identifier and Summer ELPAC Testing Tabs. Here is a document we started with the first rounds of suggestions on how to potentially manage the SSID Assginment process, until it is modified by CDE. Suggested CALPADS Workflows – Post-Process Redevelopment

New SSID Replacement Process

From the information contained in Flash 221, it appears that they will no longer have a separate SSID Replacement Extract, as they have changed their SSID Extract process to run by dates, instead of Job ID. Unfortunately, we did not receive this information until after the CALPADS system went down, and we do not yet have access to our testing environment to confirm if there are changes to their extract file, or how it will work with the existing process we have in place for importing SSIDs. As soon as we gain access to test the new process, we will identify any changes that might need to be made, and prioritize them for development.

Student Search Application Program Interface (API)

The CDE indicated in Flash 221 that they plan to implement a Student Search Application Program Interface (API) that will enable us to implement a feature within Aeries that will search for potential transfer students to acquire their SSIDs, without requiring logging into CALPADS. We volunteered to assist in that project months ago, however the CDE is not yet ready to give us access to their system to build and test this feature. As soon as access is granted, we should be able to implement this feature quickly, as we already have a similar process in place for Texas customers with their State Reporting System. We will keep you advised when this programming is started.

**We've created an Aeries Idea for this project: Connect SSID Lookup API feature from CALPADS  Feel free to add yourself as a voter to this idea, so you will be notified directly when work is started on this feature. Also, if you have any input to give on this process, it can be added here also. 

Initial File Validations

The CDE intention was to restrict the validations that occur upon file input to only analyzing data within the incoming file itself, rather than comparing the data in the incoming file against data in the CALPADS Operational Data Store (ODS). However, in the limited glimpse we got of the new system last week, there were still validations being triggered when incoming data conflicted with existing data in CALPADS. We submitted tickets alerting them to the issues we were seeing, however since we can no longer access the new system, we are unsure of the status of these issues. 

In general, our extract process takes care of a bulk of these internal file validations (field size, date format, etc.) but there may be some rejections of records that have missing data. Proper use of the Required Fields procedure will assist in these errors, as will Data Validations. We are working on identifying areas where we can possibly assist in the future, but stable access to the new environment is required in order to make any programming changes.

**Recent changes added

Yes, Ginny, you are correct. Thanks for catching that. Like I said, it's a work in progress. I appreciate your "Eagle Eye"!