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December 2024 Releases: Data Standard 5.2, ODS/API 7.3, and MetaEd 4.5

· 3 min read
Stephen A. Fuqua
Stephen A. Fuqua
Director, Software Engineering

The gifts arrive early this week: we are excited to announce three important releases: Data Standard 5.2, ODS/API 7.3, and MetaEd 4.5. In semantic versioning these are minor updates (no breaking changes), but they include major new features. Read on for a quick summary.

Data Standard 5.2​

The most important feature in this release is addition of the Assessment Registration domain. This set of entities supports education organizations' needs to register students for assessments and share registration data with their assessment vendors. This capability has long been requested by the community, and the design was reviewed by the Data Standard Workgroup.

In the Alternative and Supplemental Services domain we have added a new association between Section 504 eligibility and programs, for tracking compliance with the Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) federal policy.

Recognizing the increasing prevalence of dual credit enrollment, DualCredit has been added to the StudentSectionAssociation.

See What's new in v5.2 for more detailed information on these and other changes. Also keep eye on this blog in January, as we are preparing a detailed list of new or modified API endpoints.

ODS/API 7.3​

The ODS/API 7.3 includes support for Data Standard 5.2. As with its 7.x predecessors, it is also possible to run with Data Standard 4.0.

Beyond this there is a long list of significant new and enhanced functionality:

  • Partitioned cursor-based paging provides improved performance when trying to pull all data out of an Ed-Fi ODS/API instance for synchronization with a data lake or another application.
  • Serialized data storage for optimized API request processing is an experimental feature that improves performance by storing the JSON payload for a resource, so that it does not need to be recreated in code at runtime.
  • Search by identification code was a solution crafted in coordination with the Technical Advisory Group, making it possible to look up a student by any of that student's assigned identification codes.
  • Token info and permissions allows an API client to look up details about what actions it is permitted to take.
  • Extensible authorization filtering allows substantial customization of the authorization model for client security. Especially useful at the state level.

See What's New in this Release for detailed information.

MetaEd 4.5​

This release isn't as exciting as the above. Most of the changes were in support of Data Standard 5.2 and ODS/API 7.3, with no visible impact on the end users who are building data models in MetaEd.

There is one gift for extension developers: ability to specify a directory with additional scripts that will be included in the MetaEd Deploy process. This directly is not overwritten in the MetaEd Build process.

Complete release notes for MetaEd 4.5.

What's Next​

Its the end of the year and we're all looking forward to a short pause. There is a lot of work to come in 2025! And you can keep an eye on it via the new Roadmap Boards in GitHub. Also see the technology roadmap for tips on how to use this board.