Supporting duplicate codes in list items

What is covered in this article? 

• Overview
• Use Cases
• Using a Double Colon ::

Overview

All list items in Connect have the option to add a corresponding code for each entry in a list.  The purpose of this is to aid in data transfer when moving data into Connect or out of Connect into another app such as a Student Management System.

However, it is important that these items remain unique so that data integrity is maintained when moving data.

Use Cases

There are cases when a school may want to use the same code for different entries in a list, such as the Current School list.

Current School List

For example, if a school entered by a family is an international school and you do not track the specific school name in your Student Information System, but instead just have a generic school such as International School.  Of course if you try and transfer a school that does not exist it may either result in an error or a value being added when you don't want it.

Year Levels

Some schools may have several year levels that are similar such as Pre-Kindergarten.  For example, a school may have:

• Pre-Kindergarten - 5 days per week 
• Pre-Kindergarten - 3 days per week

But they still want to use the same code, say the code is PK. To differentiate, you would enter in PK::5 and PK::3 respectively to keep the codes unique, but only the data prior to the :: will be included when transferred or exported.

Contact Relationship

If your Student Information System uses the SIF Specification for certain lists, such as Contact Relationship, and you are using Parent as the relationship identifier versus Father or Mother, you need a way to enter the SIF code for Parent and for each Father and Mother.  Now you can, when you use the double colon.

For example the SIF code for Parent is 1, so as an example you can simply modify the Code for Father and Mother to be 1::FR and 1:MR respectively and only the value 1 will be transferred or exported.

Using a Double Colon ::

By supporting the double colon as a special delimiter in the code field for a list item, only the string before the double colon will be exported/transferred. This allows schools to mimic a duplicate code when exporting data. Use it for the use cases described above or for any of your other lists.