Boomerang (Integrations)
Ok, he's officially lost it...
Workday Rising 2018 bands aside, I'm actually talking about boomerang integrations.
What is a Boomerang Integration?
These handy little tools allow you follow a nifty little cycle in which you can pull data out of Workday, Manipulate/add/edit the data in some way, and then place data back into Workday. Aren't you glad I used this song as my intro and not a certain Dance Moms person?No more cruel and unusual punishment. Jo-Jo Siwa is the modern Rickrolling. Here's a few use cases:
- I absolutely hate how Workday parses names from resumes. I want to run an integration that takes the name out on a regular basis, and parses it into proper case. (On a side note, this is an extremely interesting use case where regular expressions are a godsend - and you're still only going to get to a 80% solution - at best). Oh, and someone has done it. And this was an EIB boomerang. Just be prepared to fall down a rabbit hole (Mc, Mac, D', deLorenzo, etc. - have fun!) The best Regex I've seen so far for (US ENGLISH) names is below:
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(name))
{
return Regex.Replace(
name,
@"(?<=\b(?:mc|mac)?|_)[a-zA-Z](<!'s\b)",
m
=> m.Value.ToUpper());
}
return name;
- I want to send a BIRT report to a bunch of newly acquired Manager W: Drive (Now Workday Documents), right after I finish my iLoads/EIBs (Find my .clar here).
- As a result of data from another system (that I can access via a web service), I want to pull a report of employees out of workday, and possibly create new events (like, a job change) - I'm working on this project now.
- And the list goes on...
 |
| A boomerang (not the integration) |
A more detailed look
I'm going to take deeper dive into my second use case. What my Comp VP wanted was a BIRT statement of all of our employee programs, including compensation, benefits, and the like to deliver to a newly acquired employee. Sounds easy enough. But the twist was this: It had to be made available to the manager, and it had to be there right after we finished with the hires. We didn't want a new manager, with (possibly) limited Workday experience to have to hunt around for a report. And to click a button? Heck no. We wanted it available right away on day 1 so they can sit down with their directs.
A boomerang integration was perfect here. We run a RaaS report as output from workday, split it up, grab some info from the report about the manager, process a BIRT step, and put it in the W: Drive via the PIM. Here's how it looks:
 |
| A Boomerang (integration) |
- The Local-Out pulls a RaaS report, which identifies the cohort of employees (via a few launch parameters).
- Then split the report by employee (which happens to be via the ../wd:/Report_Entry xpath
- Pull out some key variables (manager id, for the W: Drive, and employee name, to name the pdf something nice for the manager), and write them to the message
- The PdfPrintStep actually runs the BIRT report
- The PIM sets the document owner (puts it in the W: Drive)
Wrapping it Up
Ultimately, there's lot of use cases for boomerangs, and David Epstein's Share-a-thons are a great place to find more, and I'm happy to be a member of teamupboomerang.com. The next sharing event is on 9/9!
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