Construct and Process Domain Feeds

Construct and Process Domain Feeds

This article is designed for IT professionals or those who have a background in running feeds and just want the technical specifications for running copy feeds. If you would like more generalized information on the uses and benefits of Feeds, or you need access to tutorials on constructing and running Feeds, consider visiting the General Information articles and How-Tos for Feeds.

Overview:

You do not have to establish or maintain your Concourse Domains manually. Instead, consider setting up your Concourse "architecture" with three feed options:
  1. Campus Feed
  2. School Feed
  3. Department Feed
Using these feeds, a System Administrator could establish and maintain your entire institution's organizational structure quickly. You can also use Domain Feeds to update the names of your Campuses, Schools, and Departments (i.e. Department of English becomes the Tolkien Department of English).

Before You Begin: Important Feed Terms in Concourse

  • Source: You'll need to select the "source" for the data you wish to migrate. It is highly recommended that the data provided by these feeds be derived directly from their authoritative source (e.g. often the Student Information System). This is critical to easily integrate Concourse with other campus systems because you can potentially cut down on inaccurate or incomplete information.
  • Separators: All feed files need to be a pipe "|" separated text file. Since much of this feed data should be obtained from a report or script within your SIS, IT should have no issue producing this for you. However, if you are to generate the data manually, note that this is different than a comma-separated value (CSV) worksheet that is typical in Excel. 
  • Updates: Making changes to your feed file and processing them again will update all row data with some exceptions, such as the unique identifier(s) for a given feed row. For example, if a new user, course, or section identifier is entered, it will create a new entry and not update the existing one. Feed-specific exceptions are noted in the feed specification.
  • Relationship: Feed files require a degree of coordination and sequencing in order to properly work. You can explore feed coordination for system data feeds below in this article.

Construct a Domain Feed

To actually construct an Item feed within Concourse, you will need:
  1. A plain text file program such as Notepad++
  2. The proper feed specification for the feed you wish to run. 
Reminder: At the end of this article, you can download individual samples of Domain Feeds for Campuses, Schools, and Departments. 

Campus Domain Feed

Campus Domain Feed Row Header:  CAMPUS_IDENTIFIER|NAME

Row Header definitions for a Campus Domain feed:
  1. CAMPUS_IDENTIFIER: The content type (Item Class Name) on a syllabus you are attempting to copy (i.e. ContactInformation, Description, MeetingTime).
  2. NAME: The external ID that tells the Feed where to get the item content you are copying.

School Domain Feed

School Domain Feed Row Header:  SCHOOL_IDENTIFIER|NAME

Row Header definitions for a School Domain feed:
  1. SCHOOL_IDENTIFIER: This is the unique identifier for the school in which courses may be offered.
  2. NAME: The external ID that tells the Feed where to get the item content you are copying.


Department Domain Feed:

Department Feed Row Header: SCHOOL_IDENTIFIER|DEPARTMENT_IDENTIFIER|NAME

Row Header definitions for a Department Domain feed:
  1. SCHOOL_IDENTIFIER: This is the unique identifier for the school in which courses may be offered.
  2. NAME: The external ID that tells the Feed where to get the item content you are copying.

Reminder about IDs, regardless of which Domain Feed you choose to run: Identifiers are unique, and therefore, these cannot be updated by changing them and rerunning the same feed. If a new identifier is used, a new entry (row) in the database may be made. This includes the CAMPUS_IDENTIFIER, SCHOOL_IDENTIFIER, and DEPARTMENT_IDENTIFIER parameters.

Best Practices for Running Domain Feeds:

  1. Remember to name your Campus, School, and Department IDs using the naming conventions found in your external systems. This helps with data migration and organization when you introduce other feed types.
  2. Remember to run Domain feeds in the correct order. Campus feeds can be run independently, but you cannot run a department feed until the proper school domain(s) exist.
  3. Always try the feed operation in your Sandbox first, and check your work before applying anything to your production instance.
  4. You can use comments (see in the attached samples) to outline the operation you are trying to run. Use comments to make your scripts easier to understand - especially if you are collaborating with other administrators in the Feed Log.


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