Integrating Ellucian Ethos and Terminalfour

What is Ellucian Ethos?

Ellucian Ethos provides a cloud-based unified data model for Ellucian’s higher education solutions. This provides institutions with a single source of truth for all stakeholders which reduces overhead and prevents information silos. 

Universities and Colleges using Ellucian Ethos can benefit from quickly and securely integrate third-party solutions with the Ellucian investment, and build on top of a powerful and extensive API endpoint. 

You can find information about Ethos integration by creating an account and logging into the Ellucian Resources site.

Integrating Ethos with Terminalfour

Terminalfour brings integration with Ellucian Ethos so you can ensure that academic and student information published on your website or portal is the same for everyone in and outside your organization. Use cases include powering website course/degree search or people finder features or showing content from Ellucian solutions on a staff or student portal.

The integration described here is intentionally read-only and does not post data to Ethos.

In Terminalfour you can connect to Ellucian Ethos using the External Content Syncer. To do this first set up the Data Source. From version 8.3.9, Terminalfour ships with a native Ethos Connector. This driver is not compatible with older versions of Terminalfour.

You can add Ellucian Ethos as a Data Source when you are setting up the Content Syncer.

The fields are as follows:

<com.terminalfour.database.t4ethosjdbc.core.JDBC

In Content > Integration Tools > External Content Syncer select Add new data store:

If you’ve used the External Content Syncer before many of these settings will be familiar however there are some differences. 

Have a look at the External Content Syncer configuration page for more information.

Many clients use the Content Syncer to fetch database results using SQL but when Ellucian Ethos is used as the Data Source the options to select a table or add SQL are replaced by other web services focused options:

A note on limits in returned results 

Ethos imposes limits on the number of records that can be returned by some data models. These do change but at the time of writing some common limits include:

Multiple Content Syncs with offsets are required in order to return numbers of records that exceed the limit. In the case of "Courses", which has an upper limit of 30 records you can create multiple Syncs with the following queries:

api/courses?limit=10

application/vnd.hedtech.integration.v16+json

Some data model entities

All data models are supported by Terminalfour. Some examples of these are:

• Courses

• Course Topics

• Course Title Types

• Course Statuses

• Course Levels

• Course Categories

• Academic Programs

• Academic Catalogs

• Academic Credentials

• Academic Disciplines

• Academic Honors

• Academic Levels

Example Resource

The following is an example of the “Courses” resource:

{
        "id": "dcf79a45-b399-4ada-bfd4-bd797d3259b1",
        "titles": [
          {
            "type": {
              "id": "f40562c9-684e-42da-96ae-44316fed2aa3"
            },
            "value": "Math 101"
          },
          {
            "type": {
              "id": "5a1e2ac3-7f87-40c5-b435-39168b6e235d"
            },
            "value": "Engineering Mathematics 101"
          }
        ],
        "description": "Beginning mathematics",
        "subject": {
          "id": "25892e17-80f6-415f-9c65-7395632f0223"
        },
        "topic": {
          "id": "8599a236-958d-4710-97da-cafa9efd3b7e"
        },
        "categories": [
          {
            "id": "529493fa-c8f4-422f-a45e-4d5b26dd4c1b"
          },
          {
            "id": "be6ceea4-c2f8-4b41-a784-c8d7df8067ce"
          }
        ],
        "courseLevels": [
          {
            "id": "e33898de-6302-4756-8f0c-5f6c5218e02e"
          }
        ],
        "instructionalMethodDetails": [
          {
            "instructionalMethod": {
              "id": "3a768eea-cbda-4926-a82d-831cb89092aa"
            },
            "instructionalDeliveryMethod": {}
          }
        ],
        "hours": [
          {
            "administrativeInstructionalMethod": {
              "id": "d3680341-fd24-40f6-bdf0-76dca1316fb5"
            },
            "minimum": 3,
            "maximum": 9,
            "increment": 3,
            "interval": "day"
          }
        ],
        "owningInstitutionUnits": [
          {
            "institutionUnit": {
              "id": "61820135-a36b-4308-99f7-28697ab7a0b1"
            },
            "ownershipPercentage": 50
          },
          {
            "institutionUnit": {
              "id": "00cd9680-9090-4b38-92ce-7b72d50421ba"
            },
            "ownershipPercentage": 50
          }
        ],
        "schedulingStartOn": "2014-10-16",
        "schedulingEndOn": "2014-11-30",
        "number": "101",
        "academicLevels": [
          {
            "id": "11cdd494-de5b-460e-9ddf-4e84bad6f596"
          }
        ],
        "gradeSchemes": [
          {
            "gradeScheme": {
              "id": "fd3f06e5-84cd-4d2b-82df-406ae9c39650"
            },
            "usage": "default"
          },
          {
            "gradeScheme": {
              "id": "f14a648d-c757-4c7a-b283-1fa74e561d63"
            },
            "usage": ""
          }
        ],
        "credits": [
          {
            "creditCategory": {
              "creditType": "institution",
              "detail": {
                "id": "bd582974-7421-4502-8fd4-b3966e08923e"
              }
            },
            "measure": "credit",
            "minimum": 1,
            "maximum": 4,
            "increment": 1
          }
        ],
        "billing": {
          "minimum": 1,
          "maximum": 5,
          "increment": 1
        },
        "waitlistMultipleSections": "notAllowed",
        "reportingDetail": {
          "type": "nebraska",
          "courseWeight": 10
        },
        "administrativePeriod": {
          "id": "060d0dd1-75aa-4c43-989c-0015b6f01d6e"
        },
        "status": {
          "id": "ed348068-d0ff-4aa8-bb13-acf8c165b354"
        },
        "additionalClassifications": [
          {
            "cipCode": {
              "id": "8814cd44-8dd2-4825-8ce9-6ce50c9e91e2"
            }
          }
        ]
      }

This is the flattened key/value pair that is output by the “Fetch example data” button and can be used map to Content Elements:

A slightly more complex query uses criteria. In this case, using the InstitutionUnit ID:

A good way to get acquainted with how queries are constructed is to use the Postman API Development Environment. With this you can look up GUID values (like the owningInstitutionUnits ID above).

We’ve created an article on using Postman with Ethos and you can read it here.