Understanding Affiliations Setup

Affiliations is designed to enable institutions to create and track the roles or relationships that a constituent may have simultaneously with an institution. The configuration of business rules to create and assign these affiliations will vary from institution to institution. Setting up the affiliations feature enables each institution to tailor the specific affiliation code, create a hierarchical structure for the affiliation code, and specify how the affiliation code is managed, either manually or through application-specific transactional events.

Affiliation setup relies on PeopleTools Integration Broker, Constituent Web Services messaging, and an Affiliation Engine. There are two main concepts to consider when implementing affiliations for your institution:

1. Define your requirements.

   The user needs to understand what changes in the Campus Solutions system will trigger an affiliation. These are usually data changes driven by PIA pages or batch programs. In addition, consider what conditions will trigger the assignment and removal of an affiliation.

2. Implementation of the Integration Broker message and triggering code.

   When you create an affiliation, you will write PeopleCode that determines – based on the information in the message contents and possibly data in the database – whether a constituent will be assigned an affiliation or whether the affiliation will be removed.

The PeopleSoft Campus Solutions Affiliations Developer's Guide contains detailed information about web services in general and affiliation setup examples.

There are five high-level steps to set an affiliation:

1. A constituent's information is changed in the system.

   This change might result from an applicant applying online, an administrator updating a constituent's information, or from a batch program that updated a constituent's records.

2. As a result of the information changes, an integration broker message is fired.

3. The affiliation framework listens to the Integration Broker message and adapts it to a constituent object so that the Affiliation Engine can understand and process it.

4. The Affiliation Engine evaluates the constituent object and determines whether, based on the institution's rules, an affiliation should be assigned or removed.

5. If an affiliation was assigned or removed, the system sends a constituent message to notify downstream processes that utilize affiliation data.

Affiliations functionality enables your institution to create and manage detailed, complex relationships with the people in your Campus Solutions system; it does not replace existing Relations with Institution functionality in Campus Community or Constituent Types functionality in Contributor Relations.