Notes
We started off this sprint review with a few reminders and announcements:
- Refresh your collections. If you downloaded our specification from the website for import into Postman, Insomnia, or another API tool, don’t forget to update it periodically. It doesn’t update automatically, so you’ll need to do it manually by downloading a fresh copy of the specification. We’re adding new things every week!
- No new data for a little while. We’re starting the cutover dress rehearsal today, so the data in the API will be static for at least a few days. We expect to have new data available for core features like worktags by the end of the week, and the rest of the endpoints by mid next week.
- False precision in datetimes. We noticed that a lot of the datetime values we get from Workday have a label that refers only to a date and not a time, and the time value itself is exactly 7:00 AM for all records. We think this is a side effect of converting dates to a datetime that comes from Workday being hosted in California (7 hours off UTC). As we add new fields going forward, we’ll plan on truncating these values and only including the date portion in the API results. We don’t want to give the impression of more precision than is actually available. At some point we’ll go back and reformat the existing datetime values, but we’ll give you plenty of notice so you can modify your processes.
We got through a lot of tickets this sprint, but only small changes are visible to most API users. We fixed a bug that made a few endpoints’ active attribute disappear – everything’s back to normal now. Some of the filters described in the OpenAPI specification weren’t actually implemented, but those have been cleaned up now. We tweaked the fields that show IDs of other records (foreign keys, essentially) in the new supplier contracts endpoint so that they don’t also include the name of the other record. We brought consistency to how true/false values are presented, and we converted one of our ETL processes to use EAP data instead of a Workday direct report.
We’re working on adding a new lastModified field to all records that would indicate when some value of that record last changed in the Finance API. The intended use is for systems that need to synchronize a list of records with an internal system, so they can request only the records that have been added or changed since they last checked. We’ll have more details on this when we roll out the feature.
As usual, we increased our test coverage, and we started looking into metrics of how people use the API to get a sense of which parts are the most used, which cause errors, etc. This will help us monitor the API in the long term.
API changes
- Removed the names that were appended to awardId and company in supplier contracts
- Supplier contracts isSubjectToFfata converted to a boolean
- Supplier contracts lineTotalAmount and originalContractAmount converted to numbers
- Removed extra filters from budget lines, expense reports, gifts, programs, projects, sales items, supplier contracts
- True/false values are now proper booleans
Recording
ASP API Sprint 64 Review