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Unistats record 2019/20

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Unistats record 2019/20 - File structure

Version 1.0 Produced 2019-03-18

The physical file structure to be returned to HESA is based on the logical data model but with repeating elements associated with the logical entities expressed seperately.

Entity Repeating element Description
KISCourse CourseLocation To specify course locations for linking data

The physical file structure is shown in the diagram below.


Physical data structure

Data format

Data must be returned to HESA as an XML file. XML is the eXtensible Markup Language and is a W3C recommendation.

Files must be encoded with UTF-8 and schema validation will be in place to ensure this. Providers 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.

Ordering of attributes for submission

The order in which entities and fields should be submitted is governed by the Cyy061.xsd file, which is ordered according to the following principles:

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

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