Availability of new features in the various link products
Overview
This information applies to the provider-facing integration channels for the UCAS Undergraduate and UCAS Conservatoires schemes only. UCAS is committed to keeping the web-link user interface for these schemes up-to-date with all new functionalities.
These rules are active until December 2023, when odbc-link will be decommissioned, and this information will be reviewed.
When we make any change to any of the link products, we will provide extensive release notes which document what is changing and the impact, or not, to each of our link products.
We will also ensure these changes are available for you to build against/test in a sandbox environment, in advance of a release into production.
Principles
- Brand new endpoints that which have not been offered previously will go into ucas-link only.
- New operations and data that overlap existing ones will go into ucas-link and will be replicated in xml-link.
- Changes that would break the fairness rule for the 2022/23 cycle or break odbc-link before it’s decommissioned will be made in odbc-link, xml-link and ucas-link.
- Bug fixes will be made in all affected link products.
You can find further information and some examples below.
| Changes which: | Change examples | odbc-link | xml-link | ucas-link | web-link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| break the 'fairness rules' for the 2022/23 cycle | Displaying to HEPs where a grade is being appealed | X | X | X | X |
| break existing functionality in the existing link products (until odbc-link is decommissioned) |
|
X | X | X | X |
| result in new data or operations that overlap existing ones |
|
X | X | X | |
| bring new operations that are not already offered in full or part thereof in any existing link product |
|
X | 1X | ||
| are bug fixes (may only be impacting one of the link products depending on the nature of the bug) | X | X | X | X |
1 If appropriate.