With the Workday go-live, PICH will no longer publish new messages. Services using PICH today will need to migrate to the Person API. Additionally, new functionality will only be added to the Person API. We recommend migrating to the Person API today to gain access to new functionality and avoid deadline pressure as the Workday go-live approaches.
What is the Person API?
The Person API is a RESTful API for people at the Universities of Wisconsin. It provides both demographic and HR information. It also provides webhook functionality for real-time updates about people using webhooks.
Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. They are triggered by any change to person data. When a change occurs, the Person API makes an HTTP request to the URL configured for the webhook. Users can configure them to invoke behavior in their own systems.
How do you migrate to the Person API?
To switch to the Person API and its real-time capabilities, you’ll need to replace your JMS connection to PICH with a webhook receiver connected to the Person API. For more information about creating a webhook receiver, see our Person API Webhooks documentation.
How do Person API Webhooks Compare to PICH?
The Person API provides similar event driven updates to those offered by PICH. It provides webhooks that give you real time updates to person data. These updates are pushed to you, so you don’t need to poll the API. These webhooks and replays of these webhooks are available via self-service, so you can manage your own connection and configuration. It also offers various filtering options on these notifications, so you only see the notifications you care about.
There will also be some changes in behavior. In contrast to the JMS connections used in PICH, a webhook does not require maintaining a persistent connection to the API, so it will be more reliable. Whereas there was a single supported PICH client for Peoplesoft, the Person API can be used by many different platforms, including IICS, Peoplesoft, Salesforce, and from custom applications developed using modern programming languages and frameworks.
The Person API only contains a subset of data currently in PICH. One field it does not contain is SSN. If you are using SSN for identity matching today, we recommend exploring what is available in the Person API to determine if you are able to accomplish identity matching with current Person API functionality. The Person API supports many other types of identifiers. You can see the full list at our Identifiers Endpoint documentation.
We will continue to add new data elements and identifiers to the Person API over time. If there are other data elements you used from PICH that are not in the Person API, please reach out to us and we can discuss adding them.
For specific milestones, visit our team’s dashboard, or email api@doit.wisc.edu to be invited to our public, biweekly sprint reviews.
Wesley Szamotula – Person API Software Engineer
Division of Information Technology