The Ed-Fi “Classic Dashboards” are no longer supported through the Ed-Fi Alliance. You can still receive support and maintenance through the Ed-Fi vendor community. Please look at any of the vendors’ dashboard solutions on the Registry of Ed-Fi Badges or the Ed-Fi Starter Kits if you are looking for a visualization solution to use with the Ed-Fi ODS. This documentation will remain available to assist existing Classic Dashboard implementers.

Creating a Year-End Snapshot

Owned by Itzel Torres
Apr 01, 2019
2 min read

This article discusses how to use the Ed-Fi ETL Application to create a year-end snapshot.

The Ed-Fi Dashboards are supported by multiple databases that store different information specific to the needs to of the application. The DashboardDW database is the data store containing historical metric information for each school year. The year-end snapshot process records end-of-current-year metric calculations into the DashboardDW database to power a set of prior-year and year-on-year metrics for the years that follow.

A screen shot of a year-on-year metric example follows (the UI shows the metric with a label reading Prior Year):

Year-End Snapshot Process

The year-end snapshot process uses the same Ed-Fi ETL Application that powers the dashboard metrics. The application and database each require some light configuration. Below are the steps to configure the various components to produce a year-end snapshot:

  1. Confirm that the current school year has ended for all schools with data in the ODS.
  2. Execute the Edfi.Runtime (i.e., the Ed-Fi ETL Application) to populate the Dashboard DB with the data that will be migrated to the Dashboard DW. This ensures that the very latest data is included in the metrics that will be stored.
  3. For the prior-year metrics to be created, the MetricSnapshotTaken column in the dw.LocalEducationAgencySnapshot table in the DashboardDW database must be manually updated to “false” for each Local Education Agency and School Year. 
    • Note that the ETL application will check if the MetricSnapshotTaken column is flagged as true which means that the prior-year metrics are ready to be taken. (From an operational standpoint, this flag should be set after verification has been given that the data in the ODS is accurate and complete for the school year.)
  4. Locate the configuration file for the Edfi.Runtime executable, set the configuration option RunOnlyYearEndSnapshot to "true".
  5. Execute the ETL application. This migrates the current Dashboard data to the Dashboard DW.
  6. Set the configuration option RunOnlyYearEndSnapshot back to "false". This ensures that the next run will be for the current year.

Detailed information on configuring and running the Ed-Fi ETL application can be found in the ETL Developers' Guide.

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