Order Feed
The Unizin Order Tool provides an automated report to Institutions called the "Order feed." As the name suggests, this report captures the orders placed by institutional faculty, instructors, course coordinators, and program administrators. Institutions use the Order Feed for a variety of business reporting and business processes.
The current version of the Order Feed is 2.0.
Order Feed overview
An Order Feed is a single file in a comma-separated value (CSV) format.
Every Order Feed file is term-specific. If an institution has allowed ordering for multiple terms at once, then multiple order feeds may be generated at the same time.
Two kinds of Order Feeds are generated:
Delta Order Feeds are generated every night. They report new and changed orders from the past 24 hours. If no new orders have been created or changed in 24 hours, then the Unizin Order Tool does not generate a delta Order Feed.
Full Order Feeds are generated every Monday morning. They report all of the orders for a particular term. These can be used to true up the orders on a weekly basis.
Delta and Full Order feeds are generated at 8:00 am UTC and pushed to an FTP server where they are accessible by an institution.
Order Feeds are generated for both the production (PROD) and user acceptance testing (UAT) environments. Institutions may use the same FTP server credentials they use to push their data integration for Order Tool in the PROD and UAT environments.
Filename schema
The Unizin Order Tool’s order reporting is delivered as comma-separated value (CSV) files. One file is generated for each Term that is currently open for ordering. The Unizin Order Tool will use the sis_term_id value from your data integration in the filename of each CSV file, as follows:
Nightly file | |
Weekly file |
Where:
YYYY-MM-DD is the year, month, and date that the feed was generated.
<sis_term_id> is the institution's SIS identifier for the term.
File format
The order feed is formatted as a CSV file with the following properties:
All values are in double-quotes.
If no value is required or available for a field, the string "null" is the value, not a blank.
All lines are terminated with a UTF-8 Unix style newline.
The escape character is a backslash (\\).
Timestamps are in ISO 8601 format and must include the time (e.g., `2020-12-15 04:35`).
Processing order feeds
Whenever an order is reported in the Order Feed, its current state is presented in full. That is, every Catalog Item and Content Request that is presently on the order is included in the feed – one row for each item/section combination on the order. For example, if an order has one Catalog Item, one Content Request, and two sections, then 4 rows are used to represent that order. If an order has three Catalog Items, two Content Requests, and three Sections, then 15 rows are used to represent that order.
Edited orders are also reported in the Order Feed in the same way. For example, if an order was originally placed for one section containing two Catalog Items but later, one of the Catalog Items was removed from the order, the Order Feed would represent that order in its new full state (including one section and one Catalog Item). The Catalog Item that was removed from the order would not be included in the Order Feed. If however, the entire order was deleted, then that order would be represented as "is_deleted" in the Order Feed.
The delta (nightly) order feeds represent all orders that have changed in the past 24 hours. By "change" it is meant that the order was created, updated, or canceled; that the sections on an order were updated; or, that the content requests or catalog items on an order were updated.
The full (weekly) order feeds represent all orders for a particular term.
If you are processing the Order Feed and tracking them internally – for the purpose of reporting titles in your Institutional Schedule of Classes, say – then the recommended processing pattern is, for any given section, to drop all data currently represented about that order in your system and restore it from the new Order Feed. Alternatively, you may be able to determine the difference between it and the state of that order in your system and update your records as necessary.
Note: it is expected that Institutions remove order feeds from the “order feed” folder after they have pulled it down and conducted their processing.
Last updated
