To prepare your WebAdMIT data integration for a new admissions cycle, you'll always need to perform several steps. This article focuses only on regular yearly maintenance. In addition to the actions listed here, you'll want to consult the Yearly Maintenance article to consider other ways your data integration might need to be changed to keep up with changes to your admissions processes or the CAS application. The following is a list of the actions that you will need to perform.
Each admissions cycle, your Lists and Exports will have to be transferred from the previous cycle into the new cycle. If you've made your Lists and Exports public (by making them visible to all your users), then they should move over automatically when your institution's CAS administrator performs the Transfer Settings operation. If your Lists and Exports fail to transfer into the new cycle, it's relatively straightforward to rebuild them. Simply navigate to the List or Export in the old cycle and use that as a guide for rebuilding it.
From time to time, the lists of possible values for defined option fields will change. For example, when South Sudan became its own country, a new country was added to the list of countries. Each year, a data dictionary is provided to document these lists of possible values. Changes are highlighted in the last columns of this document. You can download your CAS's data dictionary under the Help panel in WebAdMIT.
In addition to changes to the lists of possible values for defined option fields, there will be changes to some basic fields in WebAdMIT. The most important of these is the designation program identifier. Each cycle's programs are distinct from other cycles, even if the programs are the same from cycle to cycle. For this reason, the numeric identifier for a given program in one cycle will be different for the same program in a different cycle. Bear this in mind when configuring your data load.
Each cycle, the headers automatically assigned to custom questions will change. Specifically, the numeric identifier included in the header will change. In our data model, each cycle's custom questions are distinct, even if the question is the same; therefore, the numeric identifier will change. You'll need to accommodate this change in your data integration. You can go about this either by:
Some systems recognize fields based on their position in the incoming file, so a change to the header may not affect your data load at all.
If you're using the WebAdMIT API to extract data, you'll need to make some changes to your calls to make sure you're getting the right CAS data.
For more assistance with yearly maintenance, review our Yearly Maintenance for Your Integrations topic.