Hi all,Has anyone managed a data import from the UK Government's schools database (used to be known as Edubase)? Here's the link: Get information about schools - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)We'd like to start importing this data on an annual basis to help our reporting around which schools visit us over at the Gallery, and were wondering if anyone has managed this process before, or has a procedure for a recurring annual import of this data? I'm particularly interested to know how the process around attributes/attribute values works, as well as how to handle affiliations. Would love to chat to anyone that's managed this before or has any advice.If it helps, we're a Tessitura-hosted organisation running TNEW. We currently collect some information from schools that book via a web form, which gets converted into a CSI on the school's, but would love to keep what we ask here to questions directly relevant to the booking itself, rather than school demographics.Thanks so much,James
Hi James.
We've looked into this in the past. We did a bulk-import of the Edubase data quite a few years ago, and then copied the data we wanted into a local table. At that point, I think a script was written to match the Edubase School address to a Customer No in our Tessitura DB where possible (adding that number to the new local table), and then any Tessitura Schools that didn't auto-match were matched manually. A custom screen was also written to present the (small subset of) data to the User.
It's on the backlog (currently item no 138 if I remember correctly) to write something that would import the Gov data either annually or semi-annually and then update our records with the appropriate new values. The issue we found was that the Gov data was, frankly, rubbish and full of mistakes (although this might not be the case any more). What made things more difficult was that Schools could change name, URN, Establishment Number or Address for a variety of reasons (change of Education type, merger of premises etc) so I was unable, at the time, to write anything that would function with any firm degree of reliability regarding auto-updating.
I think the idea was to use the Schools data to target Marketing campaigns, but we've had quite a few personnel changes over the years, so those who were driving this change have now left and the impetus has faded.
Steve
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