UHIMS Events

Table of Contents

Overview

UHIMS Events refers to messages that UHIMS publishes to the UH Message Broker. It is a convenient way of receiving identity, affiliation, and contact information about the students, faculty and staff that your application serves. The data comes from several official sources, including Banner, PeopleSoft, RCUH, SECE and WPMS. UHIMS digests the information from these various systems and makes it available in one place.

UHIMS Events is currently being used by the following UH applications:

• KFS
• myGRANT
• Honolulu Community College

Message Specs

• UHIMS Events - Message Specs
• History
  • 7/17/2013 5pm HST

    • Adds <uids> to every message where <uhUuid> is the key, e.g

      <addContactInfo>
       <messageData>
        <uhUuid> 00000000 </uhUuid>
        <uids>
         <uid> jsmith </uid>
        </uids>
        ...
      

      • This is useful for apps that use the UH Username as the key identifier.
      • It lists all usernames a person has at the time of the message. Most people should have only one username, but it is not impossible to see multiple usernames.
      • <uids> is skipped if the person does not have any usernames
      • <uids> is not included in username messages (addUsername, modifyUsername*, deleteUsername) because their key is a single <uid>.
  • 1/23/2013 5pm HST
    • Adds optional <displayName> to <addPerson> and <retrofitPerson>
    • Adds a new value to <role>, staff.executive.overload, its roleCategory in message routing key is staff)
    • Deleted references to date of birth and SSN because they are not usually included:
      • Deleted <modifyPersonSsn>
      • Deleted <modifyPersonDob>
      • Deleted <dob>
  • 8/14/2012 5pm HST
    • includes retrofit messages

Connection Settings

To request access to UHIMS Events, refer to Consuming UHIMS Events

Reading UHIMS Events

See Consuming UHIMS Events

Retrofit Messages

Your application usually tracks people who are currently active. It will typically do an initial load of all active people from UHIMS, followed by ongoing synchronization via UHIMS Events. One problem with this model occurs when a previously inactive person becomes active: UHIMS will not generate an <addPerson> (because person already exists in UHIMS), and your application will receive an <addAffiliation> message for a person that it has not previously encountered.

We solve this problem by generating retrofit messages that contain all data about a person.  Retrofit messages are sent prior to any <addAffiliation>, <addUsername>, <addEmail> or <addContactInfo> messages:

<retrofitPerson> (always)
<retrofitUsername> (if person has a username)
<retrofitEmail> (if person has email)
<retrofitContactInfo> (if person has contact info)

We will only include retrofit messages for data that exists for that person. For example, if the person has no username, email or contact info, we will only generate a <retrofitPerson> message prior to generating an <addAffiliation> message.

An efficient way of using retrofit messages is to cache them and use them only when an unknown-person condition is encountered:

• Cache all the retrofit messages as they arrive.
• Process the subsequent add/modify/deleteSomething message if the message is applicable to your application. Otherwise ignore the message and clear the cached retrofit messages.
• When processing as an applicable message, catch exceptions due to the person not being known to your application.   The exception handling should use the cached retrofit messages to retroactively add the person to your application.

UHIMS Events Request Form

• UHIMS Events Request Form