All School Clones? Self-to-self Relationships?

Jessi Walters

Hey everyone! I'm Jessi Walters, the Product Manager for Core in Education Management. We've found a couple of interesting things are happening with some regularity, and I'm curious to learn more.

1. There are some users we've found that have relationships to themselves. Do you ever create these relationships on purpose? If yes, please tell me why and/or how that helps you. (We only see problems with things like Profile access, so I'm wondering whether it's appropriate to prevent self-to-self relationships.)
2. There are a lot of All School role clones. If you have created an All School clone and have assigned it to users with benefit, I'd love to hear what problem that helps you solve.

Thanks for your input and partnership!

Brian Gray

Jessi -

We have never intentionally created a user self-relationship, but it does happen sometimes during enrollment of new students. (I refer to these as Evil Twins…)

We use Finalsite Enrollment (AKA SchoolAdmin). When the enrolled students are transferred from Finalsite to Core (using the Blackbaud School API), it adds sibling relationships for any new student records created at the same time who have the same parent(s). This is a good thing.

However, if the parents have created more than one Household in Finalsite and the same parent is listed in more than one of the households, Finalsite will create the self-relationship for the incoming student. This is a bad thing.

Part of my processing for incoming students is to check for the evil twin relationships and manually remove them. There is no reason that we would want to have a student listed as his own sibling.

I consider it to be a bug in Finalsite's logic, but they disagreed the last time I talked to them about it. I also think that it's a bug in the Blackbaud API - the Relationship POST should reject a request that has the same UserID for both users.

In a semi-related matter that you did not ask about…we do sometimes intentionally create two relationships between an adult and a student. This is usually done to permit the adult (grandparent, adult sibling of the minor student, etc) to be listed as the Guardian of the student. We don't want to delete the permanent relationship so we add the Guardian relationship. We have to do this for a couple of reasons: 1) the adult sibling can't be granted Parental Access on the sibling relationship record, and 2) some 3rd party services rely on the Parent and Guardian roles - they don't look at anyone who does not have one of those roles.

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We do/did have one clone of All User (called Curriculum Preview). It is not actively used now. It was created in the Whipple Hill days. I think the intent was to allow a handful of people to review course descriptions before they were published publicly.

Jessi Walters

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/comment/311096#Comment_311096

LOL at "evil twins" 😂 Thanks for taking time to compose the thoughtful feedback! I'll share it with the team.

Still eager for feedback from others; even a thumbs up on Brian's (or other responses as they come) is helpful!

Geoffrey Goodfellow

We don't have any clones of All School that I know, and we try not to permit any relationships to self. As Brian mentioned, the time this frequently happens is during the admissions process when a parent uses their own name instead of child's name on some admissions form that gets processed. We undo any of these that we see come across. The second scenario is the dreaded Jr. Sr. III, etc. where the dad and student essentially have the same name. If staff are not careful, it is easy to match an applicant record with a parent record and introduce an evil twin.