How To Add State Identifiers in Rostering
To understand how identifiers are mapped from your rostering system/SIS to SchooLinks, you first need to understand the available "buckets" in SchooLinks where identifiers can be populated. The fields below show the available identifier fields for data types populated during the rostering process. Each data type requires at least one identifier field to be populated, with the exception of Guardians. Guardian accounts don't require an identifier if the following schema is used to create them:
| Schools | Students | Staff | Guardians |
|---|---|---|---|
school_number |
student_number |
teacher_number |
|
school_sis_id |
student_sis_id |
staff_sis_id |
guardian_sis_id |
school_state_id |
student_state_id |
staff_id |
We recommend placing identifiers in the bucket that most closely matches your colloquial definition of the type of identifier. We recommend that state identifiers be placed in _state_id columns, internal IDs or primary keys to your SIS in _sis_id columns, and external identifiers into the _number columns.
However, there are no limitations to prevent certain type of identifiers from being defined as a different identifier type. For example, you could take a student’s state ID and populate that identifier in all three available columns for students.
SchooLinks also provides an internal tool to help find identifiers and the SchooLinks fields that holds the values. You can access the Example Identifiers tool by navigating to Admin → Data Upload → Example Identifiers. This tool will take an example student, staff, and school record that exist in SchooLinks and list out the identifiers that we receive from the rostering process. You can then match what you have on record in your SIS to determine which SIS field aligns to the correct SchooLinks field.
Whether you are rostering or providing additional student data sets (GPA, class rank, attendance percentage, etc..). with CSV, it is important that the identifiers in your CSV match with an identifier that we have stored in SchooLinks. The column header that is passed in your CSV needs to be named appropriately for the SchooLinks field you attempting to match on.
Our CSV schemas in the **Technical and Data Integration Guide** all require some sort of identifier to match on to link the data type you are importing to a SchooLinks account. For these data schemas, only 1 identifier is required for a successful match to an account record. You will see this documented in our schemas (like our GPA schema) as such:
As seen in our Description of the first column (student identifier), must be one of the following:
student_sis_idstudent_numberstudent_state_id