APIs to Pull Data by Roles verse Users

Lindsey Bryant
Lindsey Bryant
Third Anniversary Kudos 2 First Reply Name Dropper
in Education Management APIs

I wanted to see if others thought it would be helpful to have APIs that allow us to pull data by roles verse specific user ids. We are a school of close to 1,100 students and we are trying to leverage the APIs to populate an ODS layer in our Data Warehouse for integrations. In full disclosure, we only use BBEM as a Student Information System. We have separate systems for Admissions, Employees, Alumni, etc. So it's vital we can pull data down in large chunks, cycle through pages or row limits, and then take action accordingly.

A few examples we're ran into include:

Academic Student Enrollment
Academic Sections
Standardized Test Scores
User Employment

Are others running into this same issue? @Stephen Boyle, could this be something considered as new APIs are built?

Comments

  • Stephen Boyle
    Stephen Boyle Blackbaud Employee
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Lindsey Bryant
    That is definitely a goal of ours. We want to provide both, ideally. Part of the gaps is just the selection of what gets done first, the by user or by role version as well as which record type to tackle next. Another part is that the Users Extended by Role(s) endpoint includes a lot of data types (like occupation, education, etc.). And that blunts the pressure to add a specific endpoint for those data.

    For instance, lists for Test scores now have in both the a School API endpoint (mostly for students) and a Enrollment Management API endpoint (for candidates) - releasing Tuesday (link).

    I would be interested to hear thoughts (on top of Lindsey's) on what should go next.

  • Lindsey Bryant
    Lindsey Bryant
    Third Anniversary Kudos 2 First Reply Name Dropper

    @Stephen Boyle one thing I notice as new APIs are released is the repetitiveness of data. For example, on the Academic Rosters API that is out in BETA, there is so much data repeated that is in the User Extended by Role API (i.e. Photo details). Though it's handy to get this data in some many different APIs, it also seems a bit cumbersome and then enlarges the number of rows that are returned when we are already expecting a large data set. I would be in favor of having more dedicated APIs and reducing some of the noise as well.

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