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Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education record 2014/15

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File structure

Version 1.0 Produced 2015-03-05

Data format

Data must be returned to HESA as an XML file. XML is the eXtensible Markup Language and is a W3C recommendation. There are many XML training resources on the web, including the W3C Tutorial on XML and the resources of W3Schools.

Files must be encoded with UTF-8 and schema validation will be in place to ensure this. Higher education providers (HEPs) 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.

The physical file structure to be returned to HESA is based on the data model.

Ordering of attributes for submission

The order in which entities and data items should be submitted is governed by the Cyy018.xsd file, which is ordered according to the following principles:

  • Entities are presented in parent-child order, starting with the 'Institution' entity.
  • Data items within entities are presented in the order of primary key data items, candidate key data items, foreign key data items, and non-key data items.
  • Child entities then follow.
  • Each data item or entity within a parent entity is presented in alphabetical order to aid their location.

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