Release No.

6.4.0

Pilot Release

02.19.19 - 9:00AM PST

Production Release

03.15.19 - 6:00PM PST

Release Type

Maintenance Window | Major Release

Applications

CCCApply Standard Application (Apply)
CCCApply International Application (IA)

Changes to Residency Logic

No

Changes to Download Client

Yes - (Download Client Jar 6.4.0)

Changes to Documentation

Yes - Data Dictionaries & User Guides

1

CCCApply Redesign Project - User Interface Enhancements 

CCCApply Standard & International Applications

See "Changes to User Interface" section
See "Changes to Download Client" section
See "New & Changed Data Fields" section 

2

CCCApply Noncredit Application Path (Phase 1: Development)

CCCApply Standard Application only

CCCApply Noncredit Application

3

Maintenance & Support  (Admin Support, Tech Updates, and Bug Fixes)

CCCApply Standard & International Applications

See "Maintenance & Support" section

4

Bug Fixes

CCCApply Standard Application

See "Bug Fixes" section

5

Issue Resolution: Problems with new Race & Ethnicity Data Fields
(Version 6.3.0, Dec 2018)

CCCApply Standard & International Applications

See "Issue Resolution" section

Included in Hotfix 6.3.1 - January 25, 2019

1

CCCApply Redesign - User Interface Enhancements

Approved changes intended to shorten & streamline the Standard App
CCCApply Redesign Project (Release 3)
CCCApply Redesign Project Dashboard - Release Timeline
CR: 2018-37B: Low-Hanging Fruit #2

Revise layout of the Residency page 

See Changes to User Interface section below.

Remove/Hide Questions from Special Residency Section Depending on Out-of-State Activity Response

Hide the following questions in the Special Residency section by default for all users

• Pubic School Employee

• State College Employee

• Seasonal Agricultural Worker

See changes to field values in Changes to Downloads below.

See Changes to User Interface section below.

Revise  the "Out-of-State Activities" section on the Residency page and add skip logic to Show Special Residency questions

Revise/Hide Question on the Education page

See changes to field values in Changes to Downloads below.

2

Noncredit Application Path (Phase 1: Development)

See the CCCApply Noncredit Application
See the Noncredit Application Path Requirements

Implement a new workflow path in the Standard Application, with no residency questions and does not calculate a preliminary residency determination via the Submission Calculation Service. 

For students enrolling exclusively in noncredit courses; no credit is given. 

See Noncredit Application Workflow Change Requirements

Implement new URL exclusively for the Noncredit path in the Standard Application. Unique for each college, based on MIS code. Replace XXX with college MIS code.

Example:  https://pilot.opencccapply.net/cccapply-welcome?cccMisCode=XXX&nonCredit=True

Revise the Confirmation number (prefix) for applications started and submitted using the Noncredit URL

To identify and distinguish Noncredit applications from Standard applications, Noncredit confirmation numbers have a prefix "NC-" for all applications that are started and submitted using the Noncredit URL. Example: "NC-4144323"

Hide the Citizenship & Military page in the Noncredit App/Path

See Changes to User Interface below.

Hide the Residency page in the Noncredit App/Path

See changes to field values in Changes to Downloads below.

Hide questions on the Needs & Interests page in the Noncredit App/Path

See Changes to User Interface below.

• Hide "Comfortable with English" question

• Hide "Financial Assistance" question

• Hide "SSI CalWorks GA" question

• Hide "Athletic Interest: question

See Changes to User Interface below.

Add a new "Noncredit Status" data field to Standard Application and set flag to "True" when the Noncredit URL is used

See New & Changed Data Fields section
See Changes to Downloads below.
See Noncredit Application Workflow Change Requirements

Add new "Integrity Flag 81" data field to the Integrity Flags table (Standard Application) and trigger if applicant applies using the Noncredit URL

When Integrity Flag 81 is triggered, admissions office is flagged, "Applicant applied using the Noncredit Application URL"

Add new value to the "Residency Status" field to identify "noncredit / exempt" status

See New & Changed Data Fields section
See changes to field values in Changes to Downloads below.

Exclude Noncredit App/Path from residency determination logic 

If the new "non_credit" flag is set to "True" - the application is not put through the Submission Calculation Service and the residency status field is set to "N = noncredit / exempt"

Add new value to "Residency Areas" status fields to identify "noncredit / exempt" status

See changes to field values in Changes to Downloads below.

Add logic to allow student's who submitted a Noncredit application using the Noncredit URL to re-apply to the same term, same college using the Standard Application

See Noncredit Application Workflow Change Requirements
Removed restriction for Noncredit > Standard Application transition only. 

Implement auto-population for fields hidden in the Noncredit Application if student re-applies using the Standard Application within 2 years.

Noncredit students may want/need to re-apply to enroll in credit courses. They should re-apply using the Standard Application to get residency-determination status. 
See Noncredit Application Workflow Change Requirements

3

Add new v.6.4.0 fields to CCCApply Administrator Rules module:

• Noncredit Status

• Integrity Flag 81

The new v.6.4.0 data fields have been added to the Rules module in the CCCApply Administrator, and can now be used in college email rules and error messages.

Add new v.6.4.0 fields to CCC Report Center domain and Full Application report templates:

• Noncredit Status

• Integrity Flag 81

The new v.6.4.0 data fields have been added to the Report Center. The Full Application report has been updated with these fields. Colleges can now be used in custom reports.

Add v.6.3.0 fields to the CCC Report Center and the CCCApply Administrator Rules module:

• Race Ethnic Full  (Pilot & Prod)

• Fraud Score  (Pilot & Prod)

• Fraud Status  (Pilot & Prod)

Due to a bug in the Report Center admin service, these tasks were unable to be completed after the 6.3.0 release (Dec 2018).

Add v.6.3.0 & 6.4.0 fields to the "Full Application" Report templates in the CCC Report Center

• Race Ethnic Full  (Pilot & Prod)

• Fraud Score  (Pilot & Prod)

• Fraud Status  (Pilot & Prod)

• Noncredit Status  (Pilot Only)

• Integrity Flag 81  (Pilot Only)

Issues: Problems with new Race & Ethnicity field values that were implemented in v.6.3.0 (Dec 2018)

Issue 1
In-progress applications - applications that were started before the new Race & Ethnicity disaggregation implementation on December 14, 2018 - and submitted after the 6.3.0 release are delivering bad values (not translated into the new format) to college downloads and the Report Center.

Solution 1: See "Issue Resolution: Problems with the New Race & Ethnicity Data Fields"

For affected submitted Apply and IA applications that have been submitted post Dec 14, 2018 and downloaded by the college, the old values stored in the DB were sent over with submitted application without being translated to the XNY MIS Format. The formats are wrong in this use case and were to be fixed. Worst case scenario, the SIS has bad values and the colleges may/may not even be aware. See "Issue Resolution: Problems with the New Race & Ethnicity Disaggregation Project 2018"

Issue 2
The SPAM training is not working. After developer research, the training process began to fail because of the bad race/ethnicity values in the submitted apps table. 

Solution 2: Unlike Issue 1, where the number of applications at-risk of being affected (in-progress applications) is diminishing over time, Issue 2 potentially affects a larger number of applications that are not going through the spam filter training service due to the bad race values in the submitted applications table. This issue necessitated a hot fix release (Hotfix 6.3.1) which was deployed Friday, January 25, 2018 to production.

Temporary workaround to app-export service so that it skips over any records that do not have the XYN format in the race ethnicity field. Records that contain numbers and commas should NOT be output since it breaks the SPAM retraining model.

Issue: Missing Instructional Text in the new Race & Ethnicity Section that was intended for original implementation

Solution: Added missing instructional text for the Race/Ethnicity Section to read as follows:

Check all of the ethnicity, nation, and ancestry groups that you identify with. When you select a major ethnicity group, you will have the option to select more specific ancestry groups. Select all that apply.

Issue: Applicants reported getting 'Application not completed' email after successfully submitting their application

The issue affects any college with pre-submission rules and NO supplemental questions, this explains why our development team didn't find this during regression testing, as our testing of college rules is based on a feature to allow rules to run against supplemental question fields.

Solution: we fixed the residency calculations, as well as multiple other calculations we have to set residency flags, to happen when the user clicks the submit button. We run the pre-submission colleges rules before these calculations happen however. The flow is something like:

User fills out submission page -> run submission validation -> run college validation rules -> run residency calculations

What appears to be the root cause of this ticket is a null pointer exception thrown when we attempt to run the college validation rules. In the process of running the rules, we convert the application to its submitted format so that the field names and properties match up to the various database columns we map to on the submitted side so the colleges can reference the fields that way in the rules. To convert the residency flags, we call the toString() method on this object and if it is initialized then it throws an NPE.

If the college has supplemental questions, we run the residency calculation flow during the transition from the supplemental questions page to the submission page so the flags get properly initialized. However, if the college does not have supplemental questions, as is the case with Moreno (All of their supplemental questions as set to "active = false" in Prod), then the calculations that would populate these flags only occur after the flags have caused the NPE.

Issue: Fixed length varies with new download client

Problem: We added code that would strip out characters in what is called the "multilingual Supplementary Plane" of the unicode encoding. Unfortunately, some characters are not in that plane, but it still requires 3 bytes to encode it. 

Solution: We updated the way we handle UTF-8 3 and 4 byte characters in the "Basic Multilingual Plane".  Added flag to the download client to output code to either UTF or ASCII.

Default is set to ASCII.

Updated the Download Client User User v.2019.1

Issue:  Missing validation in the Date of Birth field allowing future DOBs to be submitted

Solution: An applicant who submitted their application on 10/22/18 was allowed to provide a future date of birth of 01/20/19.  Added logic that prevents an applicant from entering and saving a DOB that is a date greater than the current date:

• Introduced logic so that a user is not allowed to enter a birthdate in future. Logic states that be date cannot be greater than today's date <current_date> of application.

• Error validation was also added in place to display the following: "Your date of birth must be before today’s date.

Issue: Address confirmation modal was not being displayed to homeless applicants

Solution: Implemented a fix to deliver expected behavior. The following message is now successfully displaying:

The street address you entered does not appear to be a valid address. Please review the address and correct it or check the box that you have verified the address if you are sure it is a correct address.

Issue: Edit Account app is incorrectly saving the country code (i.e., U.S.) to the Phone Number Extension field and leaving the country code blank when the users went to edit their account in the applications.

Solution: Edit Account systems in the Standard, Promise Grant, and International Apps is now mapping and saving the correct phone number data values for the phone number, the extension, and the country code, etc., for the respective phone number for the Account Main and Secondary phone numbers after editing an account.

Issue: International App not saving the Current Mailing Postal Code correctly in downloads

Solution: Fixed an issue on the Account Information & Mailing page, where the database was not storing the same data values for the Current Mailing Address fields when the applicant checks the box stating that it is the "Same as their Permanent Address".  QA has verified that these data values now match in the database.

Noncredit Status

<non_credit>

New Field

1 = True

0 = False

Boolean, 1

Yes

No

Optional; Value set to "True" if applicant applies using the new Noncredit Application URL; otherwise it is "False"

Integrity Flag 81

<integrity_fg_81>

New Field

1 = True

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

No

Flag triggered if applicant applies with the new Noncredit Application URL; otherwise it is blank.

NOTE - this is consistent with how we have all the other integrity flags structured. 

Confirmation Number

<confirmation>

Changed Value

IF non_credit=True then
<confirmation> has prefix = "NC-"

String

No

System

IF an application is submitted using the Noncredit URL then the value for <confirmation> = "NC-"

Residency Status

<res_status>

New Value

New NC default value = N

1 = resident
2 = possible resident
3 = non-resident
N = noncredit / exempt

bpchar, 1

No

Residency status is calculated at submission for Standard Application only. 
For the new Noncredit Application path (in the Standard Application) if applicant applies using the new Noncredit URL then:
<non_credit> status is set =True   and
<res_status> status is set ="N"

Residency Area A

<res_area_a>

New Value

New NC default value = 9

Boolean, 1

No

Residency area status defaults to "9" when (non_credit =True)

Residency Area B

<res_area_b>

New Value

New NC default value = 9

Boolean, 1

No

Residency area status defaults to "9" when (non_credit =True)

Residency Area C

<res_area_c>

New Value

New NC default value = 9

Boolean, 1

No

Residency area status defaults to "9" when (non_credit =True)

Residency Area D

<res_area_d>

New Value

New NC default value = 9

Boolean, 1

No

Residency area status defaults to "9" when (non_credit =True)

Declared Residency Outside California for Taxes

<ca_outside_tax>

Default values = False / Null 

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

No

IF the question is displayed:

• IF checkbox is NOT empty, value = True

• IF checkbox IS EMPTY, then value = False

IF question is hidden:

• Set value = Null

NOTE: IF hidden, such as in the Noncredit application, then default to NULL

For a standard application, it will default to False, unless the user checks the checkbox.

Declared Residency at a College Outside California

<ca_outside_college>

Default values = False / Null 

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

No

Same as Above.

Registered to Vote Outside California

<ca_outside_voted>

Default values = False / Null 

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

No

Same as Above.

Lawsuit Filed Outside California

<ca_outside_lawsuit>

Default values = False / Null 

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

No

Same as Above.

Public School Employee

<ca_school_employee>

Default value = Null

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

Required response If appears onscreen

State College Employee

<ca_college_employee>

Default value = Null

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

Required response If appears onscreen

Seasonal Agricultural Worker

<ca_seasonal_ag>

Default value = Null

Values = True / False / Null

1 = True

0 = False

Null

Boolean, 1

Yes

Required response If appears onscreen

Citizenship Status