Define Integration?

Integrations are crucial when communicating external systems with Workday. To be able to say you master them means that you understand how data can be imported to or exported from Workday. Thankfully, there are predefined rules of how that data must look like, and public interfaces you can access anytime you need to build an integration. In this set of integration questions, we do not attempt to test the mastery of the different Workday Integration tools available, but the general knowledge of how to build integrations.

What are the main types of Workday Integrations and how do you select which solution to use?

The main types of integrations are Workday Studio Integration, Enterprise Information Builder (EIB) Integration and Cloud Connect Integration.

When deciding over which tool to use we need to take into account some factors; whenever you take in the design of an integration, from the requirements you should follow a roadmap, here is an example of it:

Is the solution already pre-built? Am I connecting to a third-party vendor with a solution already in place? – If yes, most likely you will choose a Core Connector.

Does this integration just need to export or import some data into Workday? – If yes, then most likely you need to go with EIBs.

Do I need to execute several rules, and reports to get the data and calculate the results I need? For example: Determining payroll between Exempt and Non-Exempt employees, calculate deductions, etc. – If yes, then most likely you need a Workday Studio Integration.

Name a prefix you can use to search for integrations:

“intsys:”

Name some Integration ID types:

Workday ID, External ID, Reference ID

Name some input and output types for EIBs:

Input: SFTP/FTP, REST, or attachment

Output: SFTP/FTP, HTTP, Email, CSV, JSON, XML, etc

What do you use XSLT for in an integration?

You use XSLT to transform the input or output data going into an XML document.

What is a WSDL? Why are they important?

WSDL stands for Web Service Description Language, and they are important because they specify how XML documents should be formatted to be accepted as input or define the output of Workday Web Services.

Say that you have a data warehouse or an external system that needs to be updated when an employee changes their information in Workday. What integration should you use?

Core Connector: Worker

What is the name of the XML query language you can use to select elements from an XML?

XPath

Name some MVEL variables you can use in Workday Studio and what are they used for:

“lp” to access launch parameters, “props” to access message properties, “vars” to access MessageContextVariables

What Workday Studio component you can use to translate a conditional if or a loop? What good practice you should add to your integration to get notified of any errors in your Studio integration?

The Route component can act both as a conditional if or a loop depending on the routing strategy. Error handlers type send-error are used as a good practice to catch errors and send them to either the integration event or another output method via the out-transport.

Report Writing is an essential skill needed for almost any advanced interaction with Workday, and any Workday Professional (in our opinion) needs to know Report Writing to perform their job duties successfully. Whether your job includes helping a client through an implementation, perform data conversion, configure business processes, configure security, develop integrations, or administer any module in Workday, you need to be able to run and build custom reports.

Name two types of Workday Standard Reports and a difference between them.

• Report Writer Reports and XpressO reports. Report Writer can be copied and customized, but you cannot copy XpressO reports.

Which prefix limits a search to reports?

• “rd:”

What is the relationship between a Business Object and a Data Source? Give an example.

• The Business Object serves as a template of an entity, and the Data Source is the data selection or group that will create that template. In Workday, one example of a Business Object is ‘X Employee’ and for a Data Source, ‘All Active Employees’ – a report with these two selections should only return active employees within the organization. A scenario outside Workday could be a Business Object called ‘Country’, and a Data Source named ‘All European Countries’ – this non-Workday example should return Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, etc.

Which delivered report can provide the relationship between data source, business object and security groups that have access to those?

• The “Data Source” Workday delivered report.

What are two ways to create a report in Workday?

• Run the Create Custom Report task.
• Copy a Workday Standard Report and modify it.

What are some of the Report Types in the Workday Report Writer?

• Simple, Advanced, Composite, Search, Matrix, etc.

Name some differences between Simple and Advanced Reports.

• Simple reports cannot access related Business Objects while Advanced Reports can.
• Simple reports cannot be shared while Advanced Reports can be shared.
• Simple reports cannot be RaaS enabled, Advanced Reports can be RaaS enabled.

Name some types of Class Report Fields

Currency, Boolean, Date, Numeric, Text, 1:1/1:M Object, Self referencing instance.

If you share a report with everyone within your organization, will anyone be able to see the same output when running the report with the same input values? Why?

No, the output will depend on the security access to the data source of the person who is running the report.

What is a Calculated Field? How can you create one? What can you do with it?

A Calculated Field is a field created to manipulate existing data. To create a Calculated Field you can run the Create Calculated Field task. Some of the things that you can do with Calculated Fields are: lookup related values, currency conversion, string or text manipulation, evaluate an expression, format a date, etc.

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