Anybody else’s PS SIF<—>ASIS connection not working? (AKSIDs)

[Collin Lasley]

Howdy,

This year, we’ve been completely unable to use the PowerSchool SIF Connector to get Alaska Student IDs from DEED’s ASIS System. Normally, the system apparently “just works,” and it has for many years now. SIF Agent is reporting no errors, but AKSIDs are never populated in PowerSchool, and I haven’t been able to find a thing wrong with any part of our system.

To get all of the AKSIDs for our students that needed them (almost 1400 so far), I ended up writing a custom command-line program that:

1. Queried the PS Database for active students with no AKSID
2. Sent their info to ASIS via a hand-crafted POST Request
3. Examined the response and either INSERT’ed the returned AKSID into the DB (if they already had one), or
4. Sent another POST request to get the AKSID, then ran a search for that student and got the new AKSID.

This does work quite well, but it has pitfalls (I got the format of the gender wrong on the first try and reported about 350 kindergarten boys as girls to the state), and it is not as seamless as the SIF Connector used to be. Anybody else having the same problem?