Enhancements

The version 2.0.0 release of Analytics Middle resolves several key architectural problems from the original releases, and introduces improvements that make the tool easier to maintain and easier for the community to make contributions. This release includes breaking changes from previous releases.

Highlights include:

• Supports Ed-Fi Data Standard v2.2, v3.1, and v3.2 (both 3.2a or 3.2b).
  • Thus it supports Ed-Fi ODS/API versions 2.5.1, 2.6, 3.1.1, 3.2.0, 3.3.0, and 3.4.0.
• The names of "dimension views" have been trimmed to use the suffix "Dim" instead of "Dimension".
• All references to Student, Parent, and Staff tables in the Ed-Fi ODS database now utilize the "UniqueId" unique columns instead of the "USI" unique columns.
• A SchoolYear column has been added to several views, thus facilitating import of Analytics Middle Tier data from multiple year-specific databases into a single data mart.
• The old StudentDimension is now two views: StudentSchoolDim and StudentLocalEducationAgencyDim . These two views encapsulate the relationship of a student to an organization entity, including demographic information.
• Fully supports mapping descriptors (and, in Data Standard v2.2, Types) to constant values used by the views — thus removing the previous hard-coding of the views to the out-of-the box Ed-Fi Descriptors (and types).
• There is a clearly defined set of core views that are always installed, and a mechanism for the optional install of use-case specific views. The original Early Warning System and Row-Level Security views have now become optional use-case collections.
• Program-related views were removed, but may be replaced in the future based on community needs.

For more information on these design changes, please see Version 2.0 Requirements and Design.

Bug Fixes

Some of the enhancements were in response to community-identified issues, which were never logged as bugs per se. They are listed below for completeness along with one community-reported bug.

Installation

Brief instructions follow. For more detailed instructions, please see the AMT Deployment Guide.

1. Download the compiled application from GitHub, either:
   1. EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier-win10.x64.zip is fully compiled for execution in Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016/2019, with or without the .NET Core 3.1 runtime, or
   2. EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier.zip contains the compiled code without platform optimizations. Requires the .NET Core 3.1 runtime, which can be executed in any .NET Core support environment.
2. Unzip the downloaded files, open PowerShell, and navigate to the folder containing the application files.
3. Run the application with no arguments, carefully studying the help message for detailed instructions on the command line operation of this tool.
   1. For EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier-win10.x64.zip:

      cd EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier-win10.x64
.\EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier.Console.exe



   2. For EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier.zip:
      

      cd Ed-Fi-Analytics-Middle-Tier\src
dotnet EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier.Console.dll

Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

New Functionality

Now with support for Data Standard 3.1! (both ODS/API 3.1 and 3.2). The default installation parameters still correspond to Data Standard 2.x. To install with Data Standard 3.1, add flag --dataStandard Ds31 to the command. For example:

.\EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier.Console.exe --dataStandard Ds31 `
  --connectionString "Server=.;Database=EdFi_Glendale;Trusted_connection=true"

Or alternately, use the short-hand:

.\EdFi.AnalyticsMiddleTier.Console.exe -d Ds31 `
  -c "Server=.;Database=EdFi_Glendale;Trusted_connection=true"

Bug Fixes

Student enrollment now accepts students with future exit date as being enrolled, whereas before the views were erroneously excluding all students with an ExitDate regardless of when that date occurs.

New Functionality

• Added LetterGradeEarned  column to StudentSectionGradeFact 

Bug Fixes

• Resolve a naming conflict, internal to the views, that impacts ability to add the views directly to PowerBi (bypassing Tabular Data Model).
• Allow re-install after uninstall

The installation process has changed slightly, to make it easier to introduce new optional domains. Now, to install the optional indexes, use argument -o Indexes instead of the old -i.

This release includes the EWS views created for the QuickSight starter kit.

StudentDataAuthorizationDimension has a breaking change in it, reporting on SectionId instead of SectionKey. There was previously an inconsistency with UserStudentDataAuthorization, which used the Section.Id instead of concatenating the natural key into a SectionKey. Since solutions that use this dimension are providing student-level authorization, not section-level, it was appropriate to (a) change for consistency and (b) not confuse people further by keeping the name SectionKey. Per normal SemVer rules this should have bumped the version number to 2.0.0, but we're breaking that rule since we're still very early in the rollout of this application.

In StudentSectionGradeFact, letter grades are now translated to numeric grades, with the help of a new table analytics_config.LetterGradeTranslation. Default values are provided. When a student has a numeric grade, the fact view will use the numeric value. If the numeric value is null, then the view attempts to use a translated letter instead.