KFS Data Mapping Leveraging a new KFS 3.0 feature

Who Are We? VivanTech is a Kuali Commercial Affiliate that provides consulting, outsourcing, staff augmentation, and offshoring services to the Kuali community.

Working with USC We have been helping USC with: - Formulating Migration Strategies - Developing Project Plans - Functional Gap Analysis - Software Development & Testing - Staff Augmentation

The Setup: Committing to KFS Suppose that your institution has just committed to adopting KFS Your existing (legacy) system contains 20 years worth of financial information without which your functional users cannot live. Conclusion: you have to migrate the data

The Problem: Illustration

The Problem: Migrating Data to KFS Kuali KFS has close to 800 database tables & thousands of fields Naming conventions are less than helpful (e.g. GL_ORG_RVRSN_CTGRY_AMT_T. ORG_TOT_ENCUM_AMT) There is no organized way of getting information about DB fields or attributes of business objects.

The Plan – Step 1: Collect Our Approach: We collected fields descriptions from glossaries, code-level XML files, & project space HTML files. We organized these descriptions into namespaces (e.g.: Chart of Accounts)

The Plan – Step 2: Organize We submitted the field descriptions to functional experts for review. We created a single table in the KFS DB and imported the descriptions.

The Plan – Step 3: Display We created a set of screens to maintain, search, and view the information:

FFD Screens: Access

FFD Screens: Lookup

FFD Screens: Lookup Results

FFD Screens: Add & Edit

Wait! There’s More: We realized it would be useful to know more about where and how the information gets stored. We created a second set of screens that parses Kuali XML files in real-time to gather the following information:

DB-Level Information DB table & field names Data type Description Whether field is required Whether field is encrypted How to display the field on Kuali screens What input is allowed when editing the field

Data Mapping FFD: Access

Data Mapping FFD: Lookup

Data Mapping FFD: Lookup Results

Data Mapping FFD: DB Details

FFD Benefits Functional users can use it to find and identify fields when comparing to legacy systems or when learning KFS. Functional Field Descriptions are useful for developers to know how to use various business objects within the code.

Soon: Screens Lookups There is one feature that is still under development: links to screens where each field appears in Kuali! Here is a preview …

Screen Lookups: Preview

How Do We Use FFD? ETL!

Step 1: Extract

Extracting the data should be less of a challenge because you have experts available that know the legacy system and database

Step 1: Extract Results We might end up with a CSV file with data from the legacy system:

Steps 2 & 3: Transform & Load

Given any field in the extracted data set (say “Account City”), we can now have a functional expert and/or developer use the Functional Field Descriptions feature to …

Steps 2 & 3: Transform & Load 1.Search for the field name and description in the Kuali system 2.Look at the screens where the field is being used to make sure the right target field is being considered 3.Look at the data type and constraints when the field is being persisted to the database 4.Record target fields and data transformations in some ETL tool

Summary “Functional Field Descriptions” is a new Kuali KFS 3.0 feature that will empower developers and functional experts working on data mapping from legacy systems to KFS. We hope that using this tool will result in time and cost savings during this stage of the migration process.

Credits & Thanks Thanks to USC who has agreed to fund this enhancement and contribute it to the Kuali community. Thanks to the technical team at IU for having the patience to assist with the technical implementation (Thanks Ailish!!!). Thanks to the functional experts for reviewing the data.

Thanks For Your Interest! Questions? Or contact us at: VivanTech, Inc.