This page was created to contain general notes/documentation for the CAS API and Slate integration that is CAS-agnostic. It is under construction.
Common Terms and Definitions
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
CAS association | The group that owns and manages the CAS (e.g., APTA for PTCAS, ASPPH for SOPHAS, etc.) |
Organization ID | Associated with the school/institution (e.g., Tufts University). Indicates the institution’s entity within the CAS/cycle. A unique ID used in setting up API accounts and subscriptions. Remains the same across cycles. |
Application Form ID | Associated with the CAS/cycle (e.g., the PTCAS application for 23-24), represents the configurations made by the CAS association for their centralized application for that cycle, a unique ID used in setting up API accounts and subscriptions. Each year/cycle it will change for the CAS, but within that cycle it is the same for any program within that CAS (i.e., the individual DPT programs use the same application form ID because it is for PTCAS and not the program itself). |
Application ID | |
Prelaunch environment | Prelaunch is a "staging" environment that allows you to configure programs for the new cycle without impacting the current cycle. |
Production environment | The "live environment" is where you perform your applicant review processes. |
API Configurations
CAS API Account (Liaison)
To configure subscriptions and gain access to the CAS API data Liaison requires a “CAS API Account.” Access to a specific CAS environment (production or prelaunch) is granted to this account.
An Institution Manager (IM) for each CAS must reqest either a new account or that access be given to an existing account for their CAS. However, the CAS API Account itself can have a different “owner” than the IM. If the owner will be different than the IM, the owner will need to have access to WebAdMIT prelaunch and/or production in order to be given access via the CAS API Account to those environments.
Each CAS will have an organization code to identify it. So for example, PTCAS 23-24 for PHX has one organization ID, and PTCAS 23-24 for SEA has a different organization ID.
A separate account is required for production vs. prelaunch (which is a test environment available before the cycle opens), but it is possible to have multiple CAS and cycles under a single account.
Once access for a CAS/organization is added to the account, it will “roll over” each year when the new cycle is added, so this process only needs to happen once per CAS/organization.
Access to each cycle’s prelaunch environment and production environment will depend on when it is “opened” as part of the cycle (see Cycle Turnover Process).
Sample Tickets
Send to apisupport@liaisonedu.com.
CAS API Accounts Managed by TTS Slate Team
Username | Environment | CAS (Org) and Cycles |
|---|---|---|
TuftsUni | Production | SOPHAS, PTCAS |
TuftsUniPre | Prelaunch | PTCAS |
TuftsVet | Production | VMCAS |
CAS/Liaision Service Account Configurations (Slate)
To enable automated delivery of CAS application data through the API, Slate requires each instance to have a “CAS/Liaison Service Account” (functionally a “user”) which is assigned a role that allows SFTP access. This “user” is what holds the permissions, allowed networks, and other security settings to allow the data to be transferred from the CAS environment into the Slate environment via SFTP.
The CAS/Liaison Service account is pre-configured in Slate and available from the Slate Template Library (STL). Instructions for adding it are in the Slate KB.
Password
Copy and save the password prior to saving changes, because once saved, the password will not be visible. You will need the password to configure the CAS API subscription with Liaison.
Allowed Networks
In December 2023 - January 2024, Liaison migrated their CAS systems to AWS. Initially, Liaison included in their documentation instructions to whitelist thousands of possible IP addresses and CIDR subnets in the allowed networks for the CAS/Liaison Service Account in Slate. Concerns about whitelisting so many IP addresses were raised; in addition, adding the suggested IP addresses (over 7K) didn’t solve issues with file delivery to the SFTP for either WebAdMIT delivered files or the CAS API.
Liaison instructed, via two separate emails, that the following IP addresses be added to the allowed networks in order to ensure successful file delivery. They have also indicated that the “templated” CAS/Liaison Service account was updated by Slate/Technolutions, however if the account had already been added in an instance (was now custom) it needs to be updated manually.
CAS API
3.221.151.218 35.174.21.29 100.24.188.151 35.168.84.72 44.198.99.254 54.221.197.67
WebAdMIT Destination Manager
AWS CAS Production 34.226.75.67 44.212.160.251 52.45.20.177 AWS CAS Prelaunch 52.1.245.183 54.157.13.223 54.174.7.196
Allowed Networks (Deprecated January 2024)
Below are the IP addresses that are included in the “allowed networks” of existing CAS/Liaison Service accounts for future reference. It is unclear which exactly are used by the Liaison systems, the following list is provided for reference/troubleshooting.
CLEAN SLATE 12.130.14.3, * 35.196.40.74, * 35.237.218.144, * 35.237.169.192, 34.74.5.60, 35.185.121.56, 34.74.128.171, 104.196.102.47 TUSMGP 12.130.14.3, * 35.196.40.74, * 35.237.218.144, * 35.237.169.192, * 108.26.138.40, x 130.64.2.186, x 130.64.35.32, x 3.224.174.183, x 52.0.120.196, x 52.2.196.251, x 52.71.217.11, x 54.161.89.200, x 54.205.199.53, x 130.64.3.197 x
Cycle Turnover Process
Each CAS has an annual cycle which is based off of the application deadlines/timeline for the programs using it. Each cycle includes:
Configuration Portal/Prelaunch environment launch/open - institutions/programs are given access to set up the application configurations they can customize (questions, deadlines, documents, etc.). Level of customization is dependent on the CAS association rules/choices.
Configuration Portal “closes” - institutions/programs have finalized their custom configurations and submitted to the CAS association for “approval.”
Application Portal launch/open - the application becomes live/available to prospective students to access. Typically a few weeks/months after configuration portal has closed; during this time the CAS association reviews configurations and approves the configurations, and those final configurations are pushed from prelaunch to production.
Applicant data available in WebAdMIT - the last step is for the CAS to generate a new WebAdMIT “environment” for the cycle and then to push application data to it. Typically, the WebAdMIT “environment” will become available the same day the application portal launches, and application data will be sent the next day.
Automated Notifications from Liaison
When Liaison “promotes or rolls over” (i.e., opens) the new cycle for either the production or the prelaunch environment, access to that environment will be added for any CAS API account which had access during the previous cycle (it will “roll over”) and there is nothing the institution needs to do.
Automatic notifications will go to the user associated with the CAS API user account:
Notification of a user update(s), which is updating the CAS API user account to include access to the new cycle (includes a new Application Form ID).
Notification of subscription update(s), which is indicating that a subscription which existed in the previous cycle has been created/copied over to the new cycle (includes a new Subscription ID).
Troubleshooting Connection Issues
Some client connections for SFTP and direct SQL access were not allowed through the edge firewalls last night due to their IP authorization entries expiring. The process through which IP authorization entries are renewed runs as part of a recurring system process that includes other system activities such as provisioning Time Warp environments. Due to a series of excessively-large Time Warp environments that were provisioned, some of the authorization entries expired prior to the authorization entries being renewed. We have removed the Time Warp provisioning process from this series of system processes to ensure that these activities do not delay the IP authorization renewal process from running regularly. All IP authorization entries were up-to-date as of earlier this morning. We will be launching the new Time Warp and test environment provisioning process today which will begin provisioning these environments in a newly-distributed way, which should additionally help reduce the provisioning time going forward.
- Paul Turchan (Technolutions Director of Community Support), 11/22/2023
My initial hypothesis is that there's a new IP address in rotation which is the most common cause in a connection reset or timeout message on the sender side. You might reach out to the IT/Networking team to make sure there aren't new public IPs for this service.
If this is happening for a specific user account, let me know. We can check the logs to see if there's any pattern that can be discerned about when it's successful or not.
…
we're seeing 158 successful authentications in the last 7 days from a consistent IP address and zero failures. That's consistent with the behavior you and Aaron Pearson described where the connection is reset as it suggest the connection never made it to our SFTP (either blocked by something between us or at our firewall). Do you have a timestamp of when one of those resets occurred? That will help us investigate further.
Mary Ryan, could you give us a few more details on the errors you're encountering? A user unable to access files or directories on the SFTP could be that path restrictions are imposed but that would be a consistent failure for a particular user. Is that the behavior the Boomi account is experiencing? Or are you seeing something more intermittent?
…
Morning all, if you've ruled out a potential IP address change, it would be very helpful to share the user account experiencing the intermittent connection timeouts/resets and the timestamp of a failed connection attempt. That should allow us to continue investigating.
- Drew Flock (Technolutions Director of Engineering), 11/6-8/2023
Useful Forum Posts w/Issues:
https://knowledge.technolutions.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/20008552350875-SFTP-Issues
Using Postman and Endpoints
CAS Resources
Obtaining an individual application file
The following instructions use the CAS → Slate V5 Postman collection provided by Liaison. At minimum you need the name of the applicant, but it is also good to have the CAS Applicant ID to ensure the correct application data is identified.
The application data you will get back using this process is “live” as of when the request is sent. It is not dependent on a business event and is not “retroactive.” If the exact file sent via a subscription is required, you should do a replay and not use this process.
Select the environment for the CAS application you are trying to access, and send a call for an authorization token (POST Call Auth Token).
Next send a call to the GET applications list. The response will contain details for every application in the CAS and cycle (application form ID) and the school/college/university (organization) established in your environment. Use the search tool in Postman to search for the name or CAS Applicant ID of the applicant you are trying to find; make note of the application ID.
Open the GET individual application endpoint. Paste the application ID into the value under the “Params > Path Variables” section. Next, in the Headers menu make sure that Accept is set to text/csv (default is application/json, changing this ensures a text file is returned). Save the endpoint and then send it.
Save the response locally.
Open Excel, use “Open” to find the file that you saved in the previous step. Make sure to change the type of file you are looking for to “All Files.”
Excel may give a warning, but click yes to open anyway. Excel will then run through the Text Import Wizard. Select Delimited for Step 1, then “comma” in Step 2, and then finish. The workbook will open; save as a CSV file.
Go to Slate to the Source Format configured to import this type of file for the API.
Deciding to use the CAS API vs. WebAdMIT API
Identifying and Interpreting Data Fields
CAS API Data
Program Configuration Data
Source Format Configurations
Data Source Formats
In Progress
Per the Liaison API Support team 1/12/2024: Unfortuantely, applicants have the ability to decide whether or not their information gets released to schools before their submission. If an applicant selects "No" for this release, then they will not show as in progress in WebadMIT and will not trigger that application.selected.file business event.
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