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TAG Meeting 2023-05-18

TAG Meeting 2023-05-18

May 23, 2023

Agenda

  1. Housekeeping

    1. Welcome new TAG / handoff of coordination

    2. Support experience, Community Hub, and Slack

  2. Bulk API: summary and recap status

  3. Open API specification version

  4. Updating the Ed-Fi API guidance

Materials

Participants

First Name

Last Name

Organization

Josh

Allen

Denver Public Schools

Josh

Bergman

Skyward

Dirk

Bradley

Michigan Datahub

David

Clements

Ed-Fi Alliance

Wyatt

Cothran

South Carolina Department of Education

Stephen

Fuqua

Ed-Fi Alliance

Gene

Garcia

Microsoft

Jean-Francois

Guertin

EdWire

Jason

Hoekstra

Ed-Fi Alliance

Matt

Hoffman

Aeries Software

Eric

Jansson

Ed-Fi Alliance

Sherod

Keen

Keen Logic

Vinaya

Mayya

Ed-Fi Alliance

Nadu

Nair

Walla Walla Pubic Schools

Oscar

Ortega

Edupoint

Andrew

Rice

Education Analytics

Lucy

Saura

Lake Washington School District

Rick

Thompson

South Carolina Department of Education

Support: Ann Su, Ed-Fi Alliance

Notes

Housekeeping

  • Welcome new TAG members

  • @Stephen Fuqua running the agenda in 2023

  • Support experience, Community Hub, and Slack

    • TAG/GAT meeting post Tech Congress generated a request to move forward with paid Slack.

    • Ed-Fi staff are analyzing Salesforce tools, where we recently moved support tickets, to see to what extent they can replace much of the use of Slack.

    • Most likely we will end up with a hybrid situation, where staff, contractors, and governance participants (i.e. TAG) are invited into paid Slack accounts, and the generality of the community use the Salesforce Community features.

Support for Loading Multiple Items at Once

  • Vendors expressed possible support for the "synchronous batch" model, whereas there continues to be more pushback against the "asynchronous bulk" model of data interchange.

  • The simplest implementation would be a proxy service sitting in front of the ODS/API, but running in the same network segment.

    • Pro: could use with any ODS/API implementation.

    • Con: does not reduce the total number of network connections

      • Mitigating factor: but, most of the connections are on the same network segment and thus should have lower latency.

    • Con: extra item to deploy

      • But if it works - that is, improves overall load times - then it would be worthwhile, say several API hosting providers.

    • Can we build and test a prototype?

  • Most of the benefit for such a system would be during new implementations or start of a new year, when all school data need to be synched into the ODS/API at once.

  • Question about PATCH verb for partial updates: could make payloads smaller. But requires a lot of extra work on both the vendor and the API implementation. Right now PATCH is strongly discouraged in the Ed-Fi API Guidelines.

  • There is still a significant concern with vendors not optimizing their code.

    • Multi-threading

    • DELETE/POST instead of using PUT requests

      • Sidenote: for some, this strategy is just simpler to code because there is no need to have special logic for those resources that allow natural key updates.

Open API specification

  • No one identified any immediate concern with upgrading the Open API Specification, but it would be helpful to see it in action and provide feedback later.

Ed-Fi API Guidance

  • Agreement to convene a special interest group for detailed guidance.

    • Volunteers: Josh A, Josh B, Andrew / Rosh / Mark, Sherod, JF

  • Why? To provide clear guidance to:

    • ODS/API - what is allowed to break?

    • Meadowlark

    • Vendor-hosted API instances / implementations

Action Items

Stephen - Organize SIG for Ed-Fi API guidance
Members - send topics for next meeting

Next Meeting: June 15, 2023