The BDF (Bulk Data Facility) is the service employed by Job Ready to sync data from ESS (Employee Self Service) and Workforce Australia Online. This service syncs data in subscription batches that are designated by the Department to include predetermined information. The ESS data syncs with Job Ready once per day out of work hours, this timeframe is determined by the department and cannot be manipulated by Job Ready.
Different sections of this workflow are only accessible by certain users:
- Job Ready Engineers can access the data once it syncs with the Job Ready API
- Support Officers can only access the BDF service and Job Ready
- Admins from Job Providers can access ESS, the Subscription CSV, the BDF and Job Ready
The bulk of an ESS data investigation involves diagnosing where the fault lies within this workflow, if the developers cannot see any data irregularities, it is assumed that the data failed to sync correctly from ESS.
The ESS data sync workflow includes:
- The data is automatically downloaded from ESS to a CSV file
- The file is sent to the Job Ready API set up within each providers ESS instance
- The API segments data into batches and then transfers that data to the BDF service
- The BDF service syncs the data with Job Ready
When troubleshooting issues involving ESS data, the first step is to determine at what point in the process did the data fail to sync or sync incorrectly. Once the cause of the data issue is identified, the team then will investigate a resolution to the data failure; this will most likely be in the form of a manual overwrite.
If the data failure is present in the initial subscription, ESS will have to be contacted and the issue rectified outside of Job Ready.
Job Ready allows admin users to investigate the BDF data that synced overnight and stores data from up to 30 days previous. The BDFs can be accessed by adding /bdf_status to the end of Job Ready’s default web domain, for example, ‘********@jobreadylive.com.au/bdf_status’.
The BDF data is organised by programme with each programme listing all subs that Job Ready Supports.
Note
Not all the subscriptions listed are available (TTW and Workforce Australia) as the department has not released the data required for Job Ready engineers to update Job Ready’s system to support the new subscriptions.
Clicking into a subscription will display all the batches, the search bar and the ‘parameters’ button which expands the batch and displays all the data stored within the batch.
The search bar is used to filter for batches that contain specific data; the easiest example would be in the caseload subscription, searching for a Job Seeker ID will only display the batches that contain data related to the specified Job Seeker ID.
The batches will still contain irrelevant data in relation to a specified search, pressing ‘Control and F’ or the equivalent search tool on a MacBook then entering the desired result is recommended.
Note
Searching for a string of numbers may bring up unintended results; for example, if an admin searches for JSID 562341, then batches containing JSID 1256234152 will also be displayed.
The BDF service also displays a record of failed data syncs, this is typically due to missing required data. The failed data pool works nearly identically to the regular batch search, with a search bar, a ‘parameters’ button and the date/time the sync occurred.
The major difference is that the Failures column will be populated with the reasons why specific data failed.
In the event of a parameter containing more than one record, the failure message will include the ‘bdf_resource_id’ before the specific error message.