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Version: 8.0

Overview

This section provides important conceptual material related to the Ed-Fi API v8 platform.

Solution Overview​

The Ed-Fi Alliance publishes the Ed-Fi Data Standard, which models a broad spectrum of commonly exchanged and shared K–12 education data. Ed-Fi API v8 is a concrete implementation of a relational database and a companion API harmonized with the Ed-Fi Data Standard. Ed-Fi API v8 is tuned to the security and performance needs of K–12 organizations and the education technology vendors who serve them.

Ed-Fi API v8 consists of two services: the Ed-Fi API, which implements the Ed-Fi Resources, Descriptors, and Discovery API specifications, and the Configuration Service, which implements the Ed-Fi Management API specification v3. Both services are implemented in C# and ASP.NET Core. PostgreSQL and SQL Server are supported as database platforms.

The platform is vendor neutral — client applications may be written in any language.

Conceptual Overview​

Education enterprises like schools, districts, and states often have student-centric information spanning several systems. Even though there is a wealth of data, the information is essentially siloed, which makes it difficult to get a holistic picture of a student or the performance of the enterprise as a whole.

Having data in silos causes other issues like duplicate and conflicting information. In the case of standardized test results that arrive on disconnected media, enterprises struggle with finding a place to store that information in a way that it can be connected with students.

Ed-Fi API v8 addresses these problems by centralizing data in a relational database, and providing secure access back to the siloed systems and to reporting tools like dashboards or BI analysis platforms. Additionally, some implementers use the platform as the primary data store for a custom student information system or as the data store solely for a centralized BI report source. The key point is that Ed-Fi API v8 covers a broad swath of educational data and provides an interface that can be configured for a variety of scenarios.

What Does the Ed-Fi API Do?​

The Ed-Fi API v8 can be useful in the following common technology tasks:

  • Integration of data from siloed source systems.
  • Quality checking and cleansing data, and de-duplicating records.
  • Operational reporting on data from a single source.
  • Providing authoritative information to client applications.

A discussion of the components follows.

The Data Store​

What draws implementers to Ed-Fi API v8 is that it provides a rich and detailed data model out of the box, which means that it can handle the real-world complexities of student attendance, grades, discipline events, and so forth. The data model is extensible, which means that it also allows for the inevitable customizations that are necessary to suit a particular enterprise's needs.

Specifically, the Ed-Fi API provides detailed resources and storage structures for the following domains:

  • Assessment
  • Bell Schedule
  • Discipline
  • Education Organization
  • Enrollment
  • Finance
  • Graduation
  • Intervention
  • School Calendar
  • Staff
  • Student Academic Record
  • Student Attendance
  • Student Cohort
  • Student Identification and Demographics
  • Teaching and Learning
  • Alternative/Supplemental Services, including:
    • Career and Technical Education
    • Migrant Education
    • Special Education
    • Title I Part A Services
  • Survey

If you're new to the Ed-Fi Data Standard, the Unifying Data Model - Model Reference documentation is useful in exploring the domain models.

Ed-Fi API v8 stores each resource in its own set of dedicated relational tables using a tables-per-resource model. Tables are organized into a schema per project — for example, the ed-fi project maps to the edfi schema, giving tables such as edfi.School and edfi.Student. The api-schema-tools CLI tool manages database provisioning — creating tables, indexes, and authorization structures for a given API schema version. The RESTful interface makes it easy for client systems to keep the data up to date in real time.

The Application Programming Interface Component​

The Ed-Fi API is a secure, modern, RESTful interface to your data that can be accessed by any client application on any platform.

Like the data model, the API is harmonized with the Ed-Fi Data Standard. The resources accessible from the API share the same naming conventions, definitions, and organization as the underlying tables. This makes it easy to understand where data is coming from and what it means.

The API is secure. It uses HTTPS for communication, the OAuth 2 specification for authentication, and comes with a rich and customizable claim-set model so platform hosts have fine-grained control over which applications and users can see particular pieces of data. Ed-Fi API v8 includes a built-in OpenIddict-based identity provider hosted inside the Configuration Service — no external identity server is required for a standard deployment. See the Security section in this documentation for complete details.

Technology Stack​

Ed-Fi API v8 is built on C# and ASP.NET Core. It is deployed using Docker Compose, which brings up both services and a database (PostgreSQL or SQL Server) with a single command. Being a containerized application, it can be hosted on Linux or Windows hosts, as well as cloud-based platforms.

A high-level view looks something like this:

A few things to note:

  • Ed-Fi API v8 is cross-platform and clients can be written in practically any language for any modern operating system. See the API Client Developers' Guide for details.
  • Ed-Fi API v8 can run in a variety of server environments, including on-premises hardware, Docker, or cloud-based platforms like AWS and Azure. See the Deployment section in this documentation for details.