U s e r     N o t e s

Frequently Asked Questions

• Which terms of data are available in the Data Warehouse?
• Should I use the All Terms(1) or All Terms(2) data model?
• How do I retrieve registration data from past terms?
• How do I select students who are enrolled in a given course?
• How do I select active courses offered?
• How do I identify Self Support courses?
• Label Generation
• Hiding Columns

Which terms of data are available in the Data Warehouse?

The Data Warehouse is frequently having new data added to it. Eventually all terms available in Banner will be in the warehouse. To see which terms are currently available, query the Terms Available object, which is included in all of the data models.

The terms available in the data warehouse generally change over the weekend and are reported on Monday morning, so Monday mid-day is a good time to check to see if new data is available.

Should I use the All Terms(1) or All Terms(2) data model?

The GQL Data model contains 2 pages for enrolled student data: All Terms(1) and All Terms(2). These two pages are very similar; they both contain the same data, they just present it in different ways.

All Terms(1) breaks up the currently enrolled student data into three objects, Past Students, Current Students, and Future Students. These objects contain the same attributes, but different data. As the names imply, they each return information about enrolled students from different time periods:

• Past Students contains enrollment data about students for all terms/semesters before the current term/semester.
• Current Students contains enrollment data about students for the current term/semester.
• Future Students contains enrollment data about students for all terms/semesters after the current term/semester.

All Terms(2) combines all of the enrolled student information into a single object, All Students. Past, Current and Future enrollment data is contained in this object.

Otherwise the two pages, All Terms(1) and All Terms(2) are identical.

When deciding which of the pages to use, consider these guidelines:

• When you are interested in data only from the current term it is more convenient to use All Terms(1), because it provides a Current Students object.
• When you are interested in comparing enrollment data from past terms/semester with current enrollments, use All Terms(1).
• When you are interested in enrollment data for a group of students over many terms, use All Terms(2).

How do I retrieve registration data from past terms?

The Registration object only contains data concerning the current term and semester, and future terms and semesters. The Data Warehouse does not contain historical (past term) registration data.

Once grades are rolled and the current term changes, registration records for courses actually taken are put into the Transcript object. This object does not contain records for dropped courses.

How do I select students who are enrolled in a given course?

The Registration object contains not just enrollments, but also records of course drops, complete withdrawls, etc. In addition to constructing the query you want, using data from the Person and Students objects, for example, do the following:

• To select students who are actually taking a course for credit, qualify the Credit Hours attribute in the Registration object to be >0
• To select students who are officially enrolled, including audits, no-refund drops and withdrawals, qualify the Count in Enrollment attribute in the Registration object to be = Y.

How do I select active courses offered?

The Schedule object contains courses that are notA actually offered, courses canceled or inactive, for example.

To select active courses for a given term, do the following:

• Qualify the TERM attribute in the Schedule object with the term you want
• Qualify the Section Status Code to be = A
• If you only want courses with enrollment, qualify Enroll Actual to be > 0

How do I identify Self Support courses?

Self Support courses are identified in the Schedule object. Qualify the Self Support Flag to be = Y in the Schedule object.

To identify Self Support courses in either the Transcript or Registration objects, you need to join them with the Schedule object, and qualify the Self Support Flag to be = Y.

Label Generation

Typicaly one selects from the Address object, the following fields:

• FML Name
• Address Line 1
• Address Line 2

and you would probably want to qualify on the Address Code Type, at least. In addition, some further selection criteria might be desired, for example sorting by a field such as Zip Code (Address object) or Last Name (Person object). To accomplish this, you select (so that the field has the "blue dot") the GQL field you would like to sort, Last Name for example. After you retrieve all of the records, you hide the Last Name column and then click on Results -> Show as Report -> Labels.

Trouble shooting

• Sometimes GQL appears to truncated data on the label, (Street1 for example). To fix the problem, click on the button which appears in the upper left of the labels display window. This will then show you a single label outline and the fields you have selected for the labels. Click on the label field which seems to be too short and the drag the field to a desired width (the width of the label is typically what is needed).

Hiding Columns

To hide a column in a GQL result set, follow these steps:

1. On the Query Results window, clisk on the column(s) you want to hide. The entire column should become highlighted.
2. From the GQL menu click on Results -> Hide Column.

This page was last updated on September 24, 1998.