Changes to Student Program Data in the Electronic Directory

CITES will be making changes to the field structure in the Electronic Directory (ED; formerly PH). These changes are being implemented to accommodate the new Banner data formats. Please note that any applications that depend on data in these fields may need to be modified to handle the changes.

On this page:

Brief Background Why Such Short Notice? For More Information Summary of Changes Technical Background Legacy (U of I Direct) Data Banner Data Address and Telephone Data Changes to LDAP and Active Directory (AD)

 

 

Brief Background

The Banner system (UI-Integrate) provides data to the Electronic Data Warehouse (EDW), from which CITES obtains the data for the ED. Because Banner uses terminology and data formats that are different from the previous systems, CITES is adapting the ED to accommodate these differences.

Applications that depend on the legacy fields in the ED will need to be updated to reflect the changes.

However, the fall semester is about to begin, and we are aware that you may not have time to update your applications immediately. To make the transition easier, we will retain the old fields alongside the new ones for a few weeks (until September 15) to minimize the impact on applications that depend on those fields.

Note, however, that the legacy fields retain the values from the last update from U of I Direct (early August) and will not be updated from Banner. Be aware that for many students (for example, new admits), these legacy fields will be empty.

Why Such Short Notice?

We realize that this is the very worst time of year to deal with an unexpected change. Unfortunately, certain aspects of the transition from UI Direct to Banner could not be accomplished ahead of time (primarily because, until August 6, U of I Direct was still the authoritative source for student data). We hope that maintaining the old fields alongside the new ones will give you the needed flexibility to implement the necessary changes.

For More Information

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact consult@uiuc.edu.

 

Summary of Changes

Following is a summary of the additions, deletions, and changes to ED fields:

Deletions:

Current ED Field	Description of Change
curriculum	Scheduled to be removed on September 15, 2004.
curriculum_code	Scheduled to be removed on September 15, 2004. To be replaced in ED by a new field, "student_program_code", below.
curriculum_detail	Scheduled to be removed on September 15, 2004. To be replaced in ED by a new field, "student_program_name", below.

Additions:

Current ED Field	Description of Change
student_program_code	New ED field; to replace "curriculum_code".
student_program_name	New ED field; to replace "curriculum_detail".
student_level_code	New ED field.

Changes:

Current ED Field	Description of Change
local_address	Renaming to "mailing_address".
local_phone	Renaming to "mailing_address_phone".

 

Technical Background

Three fields are used in PH today to document a student’s enrollment relationship with the UIUC campus: curriculum, curriculum_code, and curriculum_detail. These originated in U of I Direct. These data elements are term-based data; i.e., one instance exists for each student per academic term.

Legacy (U of I Direct) Data

The curriculum field has no direct equivalent in the legacy source data; it was created by CITES by prefixing the U of I Direct class code (year in school) with a concocted “abbreviation” for the college from a lookup table. For example, “AGR3”, “ENG1”, and “LAW1” denote a junior in ACES, freshman in Engineering, and first-year law student, respectively.

The curriculum_code field came directly from the source data and has the format “11599” or “1263124” (one digit for campus, two digits for college, and two or four digits for curriculum).

The curriculum_detail field was derived by looking up the curriculum code in the University’s “curriculum codebook” to produce a descriptive curriculum name. The codes above translated to “ACES Nondegree” and “Music (MMUS & PhD Programs)”, respectively.

Banner Data

Banner has an immense amount of term-based data compared with U of I Direct. Banner supports up to two academic programs (the equivalent of a curriculum) for each student. Within each program, Banner maintains both an academic and administrative college, one degree, one level, and two departments. Each program has up to two majors (each of which may have up to three concentrations), and two minors. Each of these exists in both code and descriptive form. For the moment, CITES is simply replacing the student term data we have today with the closest Banner equivalents.

The Banner student program code and student program name are the closest equivalents to the old curriculum code and to the corresponding codebook value. See the table below for examples.

student program code	student program name
10KP0115BS	BS:Electrical Engineering -UIUC
10KV0343BALA	BALAS:Speech Commun -UIUC
10LE0487CERT	CERT:Professional Pilot -UIUC
10LC0480DVM	DVM:Veterinary Medicine -UIUC
10KS0220EDM	EDM:Educ Policy Studies -UIUC
10KU0385JD	JD:Law -UIUC
10KS9875MBA	MBA:Bus Administration -UIUC
10KL0002NONE	NONE:Animal Sciences -UIUC
10KS0240PHD	PHD:Physics -UIUC

 

Note that just like the previous curriculum_code, the student program code has an "internal" structure to it: the first two digits are the campus code (for student data, "10" is Urbana campus), and the second two characters are the college code, where these two-character college codes are the same college coding we now see in employee data (e.g., in home campus, college, dept).

We are adding the Banner student program code and student program name in the ED in place of the legacy equivalents in the ED (currently the curriculum_code and curriculum_detail fields, respectively). Client applications should interpret these fields as containing multiple values, with each value forming its own line.

There is no equivalent to the contrived curriculum field currently used in the ED. The college abbreviation that is artificially generated by CITES is inconsistent with “official” abbreviations defined in the codebook and elsewhere. The College of ACES is still abbreviated as “AGR”, a remnant of the college’s previous name. We also no longer have a source of the class code (year in school).

We are not aware of any core CITES applications that use the curriculum field today. The only reason curriculum exists in the ED is historic – it was provided in the original tape extract for the printed UIUC Student/Staff Directory, which was the source for the ED before we began obtaining better record data in 1996.

The archaic curriculum field serves little purpose and does not provide information that’s not available elsewhere in more useful and detailed form. The numeric and descriptive values are better suited for both authorization applications and human use. Thus the curriculum field will be retired.

The level code does not have a direct equivalent in the legacy system. This element identifies a student’s enrollment as undergraduate (“1U”), graduate (“1G”), law (“1L”), veterinary medicine (“1V”), etc. The level code’s inclusion in the ED will allow us to identify specific subsets of the student community such as “all undergraduates” or “all grad/professional students". Client applications should interpret this field as containing multiple values, with each value forming its own line. In practice, however, most students will have a single level code.

Note that the number in the level code is a campus code; Banner does not give us an indicator of year in school.

 

Address and Telephone Data

Banner maintains multiple address and telephone types. Two such types are roughly equivalent to the local address and permanent address elements from U of I Direct. Banner’s terminology is mailing address and permanent address, respectively. The ED local_address and local_phone fields will be changed to mailing_address and mailing_address_phone.

Changes to LDAP and Active Directory (AD)

For LDAP, the new attribute names for the corresponding new ED fields are:

uiucEduStudentProgramCode

uiucEduStudentProgramName

uiucEduStudentLevelCode

In AD, these three new fields will show up as additional values of the extensionName attribute, each prefixed with the ED field name from which it comes. You can tell which ED field a value is from because the value in AD includes the field name; a sample value could be 'Student_program_code: 10KP0133BS'.

In addition, with the change to mailing_address and mailing_address_phone field names from local_address and local_phone, the corresponding LDAP attributes will change appropriately:

uiucEduLocalAddress -> uiucEduMailingAddress

uiucEduLocalPhone -> uiucEduMailingAddressPhone

These values aren't put into AD, so it is not affected.