Sample Process – Checking to See if a Course Exisits
Let's face it, data entry errors occur. It could come from human entry or a bad OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reading. Using the TES API you can automate the validation of the course data before trying to set equivalencies to the bad data. All you have to do is set up a process to retrieve the InstitutionID and the CourseID to validate the data entry. If no results are returned then it may be a data entry error.
Search For an InstitutionID and then a CourseID.
Search by OPEID
Using the GetInstitutionByOPEIDCode call provide your access key ID (AccessKeyID) and the OPEID code (InstitutionOPEID) of the institution you are looking up.
Search by CEEB
Using the GetInstitutionByCEEBCode call provides your access key ID (AccessKeyID) and the CEEB code (CEEBCode) of the institution you are looking up.
Search by Location
Using the GetInstitutionByInstitutionNameCityStateAbbr call provide your access key ID (AccessKeyID), Institution Name (InstitutionName), Institution's City (InstitutionCity), Institution's State Abbreviation (InstitutionStateAbbr) and the Institution's Country (InstitutionCountry).
Recommendation
CollegeSource does not recommend storing the InstitutionID locally in a database. These values may change over time. A best practice is to look up this value at the beginning of each search.
The methods are available through the https://bws.collegesource.com/ web service.
Looking up a CourseID
You will need to know a few details regarding the course in order to use the API call. First is the Institution's InstitutionID. You can use the "How to Look Up an Institution ID" API calls to find it.
From there will need to provide a course code (CourseCode) for that specific course. A CourseCode is a combination of the departmental prefix and the course number, like ENGL 101, or MATH-101.
Finally, you will need to provide the month and year for the course.
How it Works:
Using the GetCourseByInstitutionIDCourseCodeMonthYear call provide your access key ID (AccessKeyID), Institution ID (InstitutionID), Course Code (CourseCode), Month (1-12) and Year (4-digits).
Results
If the search is successful in finding that specific course it will return the unique CourseID, CourseCode and Course Title (CourseTitle). In some case multiple results maybe returned. This is do to the date range associated with the catalog at the institution, where the date you are searching overlaps 2 catalog date ranges.
If the search is unsuccessful, an error of "No Course Found" will be returned.