The Roster Importer is an administrative tool in Management that allows districts to import data from a Student Information System (SIS). Designed to streamline roster management, the Roster Importer allows authorized users to upload, validate, and process roster files that link students, staff members, courses, sections, and terms across Eduphoria applications.
Roster updates that occur overnight are immediately available in the morning. Roster updates that are triggered manually might take up to one hour to process.
Roster Fails to Run - Common Errors
Stopped or Paused Scheduled Task - The “Prepare Hosted Roster Files for Eduphoria” scheduled task that triggers the import has been stopped or paused. A local administrator can restart the task to allow the import to run.
Extra Characters - Check for extra characters in the username in the Roster Importer. Remove the extra characters and click Save. Be sure to check for spaces before or after the username.
Import has been purposefully stopped - Server administrators sometimes choose to stop imports over the summer until PEIMS is ready to resume. Re-activate the import and click Run Now.
Username or password has changed - Go to the Roster Importer (Management > Roster Settings > Manage Roster Import) and click Test Connection. If it fails, update the credentials for an account with the System Administrator role in Eduphoria and Save. Click Run Now.
Changing Local ID Numbers
When roster files are imported, Eduphoria calculates the percentage of changes to be made by the import. If there is a greater than 50% change, the system sends a sanity check message to ensure the change is expected.
Note: Computer systems use sanity checks to make sure a process is clear to run. The system generates information so the user can determine if there would be a problem if the process proceeds. Sanity checks are widespread in computer software.
If the local ID numbers for students or staff members have changed since last year’s import, Eduphoria sees the changes as new IDs, which can cause duplicate entries. Student test data will only be connected to the original ID numbers.
Changing local ID numbers for students or staff requires a crosswalk file, a TXT or CSV file with two columns containing the OldID and NewID. Eduphoria will run the crosswalk file to prevent duplicates.
Changing Courses and Terms
Course changes are similar to changes in local ID numbers. When over 50% of the course ID numbers are deactivated, Eduphoria’s system will read the changes as new course ID numbers.
Term changes occur when more than 50% of student rosters change. This often happens when finalizing the rosters for the year. The initial import comes in but can change significantly with the following import.
Eduphoria’s system sends a sanity check message for course and term changes to ensure the change is expected before proceeding with an import.
Other Common Troubleshooting Tips
On the first table of the roster importer, click on Test Connection. If it fails, the tool was unable to communicate with Eduphoria servers. Check that the username and password are correct and that the computer is connected to the internet.
When the importer fails to finish processing, one or more of the generated files is likely missing data. To identify the source of the failure, make sure all four (4) generated files contain data. When one of the files is a 0kb file, the importer likely failed while processing the previous set of data. For example, when the error message says that the Staff and Students files have >0 kb, but the Courses and Roster files have 0kb, the importer likely failed while processing the Staff and Students file.
Contacting Eduphoria
If you need help finding the problem, contact our Support team or email us at support@eduphoria.net. We will need access to the roster files and importer to troubleshoot further.