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HESA Aggregate record for students studying wholly outside the UK 2011/12

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HESA Aggregate return for student studying wholly overseas 2011/12

Validation overview


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Version 1.0 Produced 2011-10-31

HESA has developed extensive quality assurance procedures and runs a range of validation checks against all submissions. The nature of some of these checks changes with the move to XML. This document describes the validation checks and the stages at which they take place.

Aggregate Offshore Record XML files must be encoded with UTF-8 and schema validation will be in place to ensure this. Institutions must specify the encoding used in their XML files in the first line of the file (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.

Validation check Stage
UKPRN validation at INSERT INSERT
Schema checks INSERT (included in Validation kit)
COMMIT validation COMMIT

INSERT-stage validation

UKPRN validation

The check to ensure that Institution.UKPRN is valid, is now carried out at INSERT rather than COMMIT.

If an invalid UKPRN is submitted, only this error will be displayed. The system will not display structural errors (schema checks) or business rule errors/warnings until a valid UKPRN is submitted.

Validation kit checks

HESA provides downloadable validation kits to assist institutions in the preparation of their data. The validation kits provide some basic structural and 'sense' checks prior to data submission with the aim of reducing the number of errors encountered when submitting data to the live system. With the change in structure for the student data, a new type of the student validation kit is required.

The new validation kit will perform the following checks:

Schema checks

Checks that the XML is 'well formed' and that it conforms to the rules of the schema definition (the XSD files).

Examples:

  • Every element in the file must have the correct opening and closing tags
  • Elements must be correctly nested
  • Elements must contain the correct type of data (strings, dates, valid entries etc.)
  • Elements must be submitted in the sequence defined in the XSD

COMMIT-stage validation

A further stage of validation will continue to run as a part of the COMMIT transaction in the data collection system. COMMIT validation includes checks that require comparison with data across an entire return.


Validation kit software

The validation kit is now available for download as an MSI installation file. To install the software you simply need to run the MSI file on a Windows PC. If you do not have access to a Windows PC, please contact Institutional Liaison ([email protected]) for further instructions.

When the validation program is opened it automatically checks the HESA web server for the latest set of rules and updates the package if appropriate.

A quick start guide is included in the application.

The kit utilises the Microsoft .NET framework. This is likely to already be installed on many computers as it is required by much of Microsoft's own software. You can download the .Net framework from Microsoft's website.

If you have any queries with regard to the validation kit then please contact Institutional Liaison ([email protected]).

Contact Liaison by email or on +44 (0)1242 388 531.