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HESA Student Record 2008/09 - Course identifier

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HESA Student Record 2008/09

Fields required from institutions in England

Course identifier


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Short nameCOURSEID
Typefield
Description

This field records the institution's own unique internal identifier for the course.

Applicable toEngland
Coverage

All students

Base data typeCOURSEIDType
Field length30
Part of
Minimum occurrences1
Maximum occurrences1
Reason required

To facilitate cross-checking and comparison with the HESA Student Record

Notes

This field is identical to the Course.COURSEID in the Student record.

Course identifiers will be allocated by the institution and must be unique for each course.

Valid characters

The valid characterset available for this field has been defined by a specific study undertaken as a part of the MIAP Common Data Definitions (CDD) project. The conclusions of this study were:

  • The general policy is to support all Latin-based characters for names, addresses and general text fields, but not non-Latin characters.
  • All Unicode code charts for Latin characters are supported. These are Basic Latin (excluding the C0 control characters), Latin-1 (excluding the C1 control characters), Latin Extended A, Latin Extended B and Latin Extended Additional. This set corresponds to Unicode code points U+0020 to U+007F and U+00A0 to U+024F.
  • Schemas are built in such a way that an individual project can further restrict the set if required.

The character set chosen will support Welsh and Gaelic languages as well as all European and most other languages using a Latin-based character set.

The Unicode charts that list each of the characters in this range can be found on the Unicode web site. The specific sets that are defined here are shown in the following PDF documents:

Institutions are advised to specify the encoding used in their XML files (i.e. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>) and to ensure that their files are actually saved with that encoding. If XML files are edited with some text editors and the encoding is not specified or does not match the actual file encoding, there may be problems when submitting these files for validation.

OwnerHESA
Version1.1
Date modified2008-07-18
Change management notesNote added to highlight change in data type requirement and the need to specify file encoding
Schema components
Element: COURSEID
Data type: COURSEIDType

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