Product Bulletin 120 - Attendance Incident Exports

Jul 30th, 2019

Background

Edsby has a modern, feature-rich attendance facility that is highly integrated with other features in Edsby. Most customers using Edsby choose to use Edsby for taking attendance. Many of these customers have a need to store attendance data in some downstream system (perhaps the Student Information System or a Data Warehouse), so Edsby has powerful facilities to for exporting the attendance information it stores.

This bulletin describes Edsby standard attendance export facility, and then discusses how it can be customized to specific customer needs.

Edsby’s Standard Attendance Export

The standard Edsby attendance export contains a rich set of information designed to accommodate a wide range of downstream uses. Of course not all field types are useful to all downstream systems. One record is created for each attendance incident (an absence, a late, etc.) that is stored in Edsby.

Many of the fields defined below are based on fields sourced from customer systems such as the Student Information System. Examples include fields such as SchoolID, StudentID, and PeriodID.

The “Always Present” column in this context indicates whether a field is always present in the export.

Field	Type	Description	Always Present	Example
SchoolID	String	Unique School Identifier	Yes	“3451”
IncidentID	String	Unique ID of the incident	Yes	“EAID_A_19640”
IncidentDate	Date	Date of the incident	Yes	2019-07-18
UpdateDate	String	Date and time of last record update	Yes	“2019-07-18 14:33”
StudentFirstName	String	Student’s first name	Yes	“John”
StudentLastName	String	Student’s last name	Yes	“Smith”
StudentGUID	String	Unique SIS Student Identifier	Yes	“8855435566”
StudentID	String	Unique School/District Student ID	No	“12345678”
StudentMinistryID	String	Unique Ministry ID	No	“2233445566”
StudentGrade	String	Grade student is enrolled in	No	“9”
PeriodIDs	String	Period or Periods in the incident	No	“P1,P2”
MeetingID	String	Unique ID of the attendance meeting	Yes	“P1,P2”
MeetingStartTime	String	Date and start time of the meeting	Yes	“2019-07-18 08:30”
MeetingEndTime	String	Date and end time of the meeting	Yes	“2019-07-18 09:30”
Class	String	Name of the Class	No	“English”
ClassGUID	String	Unique Identifier for the class	Yes	“ENG1D_A_20”
TeacherNames	String	Comma separated list of names	Yes	“James Harris”
TeacherGUIDs	String	Comma separated list of teacher IDs	Yes	“2_T_2381”
Room	String	Name of the room	No	“Rm 201”
Code	String	Overall incident code	Yes	“Absent”
ReasonCode	String	Short code for incident reason	No	“Ill”
Reason	String	Descriptive string for incident reason	No	“Illness”
Comment	String	Descriptive string for incident	No	“Has the flu”
Tags	String	Set of Attendance Tags	No	“ParentContacted”

Notes: All dates and times are in ISO 8601 / RFC3339 format. The “T” separator between date and time is omitted in Edsby (as permitted by RFC3339). Also all dates and times are in the UTC time zone rather than the local time zone of the school/district.

Attendance Export Customizations

Custom exports can be created for specific downstream systems. Typical customizations are based on the standard information shown above, but may use different column names and may remove certain columns if the information isn’t relevant.

Multiple different export formats can be in place at the same time. For example there may be a need for an SIS-specific export format AND a notification system specific export format.

Manual Attendance Exports

Attendance Exports can be generated manually at the school level via the “Export” button on “Incidents” tab in the Administrator’s Attendance interface as highlighted below in red:

The standard version available default to the current day, but the dates can easily be changed to export incidents from a specified date range. The “Advanced Options” section provides access to a number of advanced features including whether column headers should be included, the file extension type, the character encoding, etc.

Automated Attendance Exports

EdsbyLink can be used to automatically export attendance incident data to downstream systems. This can be done once a day or many times per day based on customer needs. Please contact Edsby support for more details on how to configure automated exports.