Notes
This sprint we finalized our new endpoint for supplier invoices and introduced a new journal entry lines endpoint. This means we’ve created all the endpoints from the roadmap. A lot of work still remains, but it’ll be smaller tweaks in response to user feedback and behind the scenes improvements to standardization, stability, and resilience.
The new journal entry lines endpoint works similarly to the existing journal entries endpoint. Because of the volume of data, we don’t store journal information directly in our product datastore. Instead, we fetch it from the data lake for you. This has several effects on users of the API:
- Journal endpoints require a two-step process: one request to specify the data needed, and another later on to fetch the generated data after it’s been prepared.
- The data generation process may take some time – usually just a few seconds, but potentially much longer. Integrations that interact with these endpoints need to be flexible enough to issue a query, monitor a separate endpoint to see when the data is ready, and only then download the data.
- Data is delivered in CSV format (at least for now – if enough users request JSON, we’ll look into converting it for you.)
We rolled out our new lastModified field on all endpoints. This field gives you the date and time that each record was most recently changed in the Finance API’s datastore. This doesn’t correspond to when a record changed in Workday. It’s intended to be used in filters so you can fetch only the data that’s changed since the last time you looked. We plan to remove the dttmLoaded field from all endpoints in the future, but there will be a period of overlap to give you time to update existing integrations.
We fixed a couple of bugs: one that resulted in funds not being correctly associated with grants, and another that was making it difficult to access individual records for catalog items that included an ampersand (&) in their name or ID. We finalized the removal of a deleted column that we used to use when records were removed. In the future, records in Workday will be marked as inactive when they’re no longer in use. We’ll continue to show the active attribute for all datasets where it exists. We also did a couple of ETL conversions in our ongoing process to move away from direct Workday reports and toward the EAP Data Lake as the source of all data.
API changes
- New supplier invoices endpoint
- New journal entry lines endpoint
- Catalog items now work correctly with ampersands in the names, IDs, or parameters
- lastModified field now available on all endpoints – filter on this for incremental updates