DisciplineAction.DisciplineActionLength (and ActualDisciplineActionLength) is int...make it decimal

Summary of outcomes for Data Standard 2.1

• Problem Addressed: The fields DisciplineAction.DisciplineActionLength and DisciplineAction.ActualDisciplineActionLength are integers and not decimals.
• High-level Reasoning: The current model only allows discipline action length to be recorded in whole numbers (integers), but some discipline actions may be assigned for part of a day rather than for a whole day or days.
• Changes Made: Updated the shared integer DisicplineActionLength to be a shared decimal instead with a total of 5 digits, 2 decimal places, and a minimum value of 0; Updated references to DisciplineActionLength common simple type (DisciplineAction.DisciplineActionLength and DisciplineAction.ActualDisciplineActionLength) to indicate shared decimal and not shared integer

Original ticket description follows:

MI extensions:

In Ed-Fi v2.0,

DisciplineAction.DisciplineActionLength
and
DisciplineAction.ActualDisciplineActionLength

have a dataype of int.

Please change it to decimal to allow for fractional day information.

Design

Change DisciplineAction.DisciplineActionLength and DisciplineAction.ActualDisciplineActionLength to have a decimal type.

Alternates considered

An alternate possibility is to change the entity definition to go from "school days" to "hours" or "minutes." Such a revised definition would create breaking changes in the field. Also, it is likely to introduce complexity that serves little purpose: since discipline actions are typically counted in school days or fractional school days, such a change would require knowing or calculating the length of the school day.

Note that CEDS only allows discipline action length to be calculated in whole days (start and end dates) lending support to the concept that whole days are how such lengths are measured.

Breaking change summary

• REST API definitons should be unaffected as JSON type is still Number. However, implementations may assume int datatypes and be affected.
• XML bulk definition change will cause validation and downstream failure.

Business logic

Transform existing ints to the corresponding language type:

• XSD: decimal
• JSON: Number (no change required)