Forum topic

Folks,

We've been chatting a bit with Alan about the possibilities of linking GNECsis more directly with UCAS (the UK's centralised system for processing undergraduate applications) - they offer a service called 'xml-link' which allows you to query their servers directly for data points on applicants in their system who have applied for your institution. In a nutshell, this would allow us to bypass creating prospect records and entering in their data, as we could query UCAS directly for this.

UCAS has a WSDL spec with a set of Get request functions that we could use a SOAP request to query the UCAS servers on. So, I suspect (with my limited knowledge) it would likely look something like this:

1. The SOAP call would be from us - that I think would be fairly straightforward to create for someone with a bit more SOAP experience, and so it would essentially compile the information from a set of Get requests into an XML file stored on the GNECsis server;

2. Then an import routine would add the data in that XML into GNECsis; I think the existing import functions in the Admissions module could do that without too much trouble, but I could be wrong.

So, my hope is that with the existing Admissions import functions, all that would really need to be done is to write a SOAP script to construct an XML file with the data to be imported. However, that might be a bit naive on my part ... :)

So, this would be a time-saver for us, but if it's a huge hassle then it can be a back-burner 'wishlist' project until there's some time in the budget (ha ha, I know!).

Thanks for your help! I have sent a copy of the WSDL spec along with the email conversation, though I can't attach it here, I don't think.