Removing the "Min Length 1" Requirements

The UDM has 108 string type data elements with min length 1 requirement and 8 more with various other min length requirements. Until ODS/API 7, the API software ignored the min length values on a string because of a bug in the API. With ODS/API 7 the minimum length requirements started to be enforced.

Ed-Fi ODS/API 7.x now rejects empty strings ("") for optional fields defined with minimum lengths of '1' in the Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (UDM). Because previous versions of the ODS/API did not enforce minimum string length, this specific case of optional string validation is causing disruption in vendor implementations that do not differentiate between an empty string and a null value. This issue is particularly exacerbated in the ODS/API 7.x implementation of Data Standard 4.0, considering these validations were not enforced in the ODS/API 6.x implementation of Data Standard 4.0.

To overcome the issue (at least for the significant amount of use cases), I recommend removing "min length 1" requirements from the Data Model.