Issue with OOB Workday Integration

This is a rant. You wouldn’t probably learn anything from this post. I’m right now going through the Workday OOB integration, and this post is a list of issues in the design of Workday Integration.

Because there is a lot of development that went into the Integration, I’ll first talk about some good things:

1. Fairly easy to extend by writing your own extensions by modifying the Factory.
2. Robust WD polling mechanism. Never had problems with fetching the data from Workday.

Things that may need to improve:

1. No way to customize the mapping between the User Table/HR profile table and the WD data. This means that there is no way I can add any more fields/delete fields control mapping using data except by writing code after extending the workday_worker_retriever class.

2. There are just too many updates everywhere. For example, the Transform Map is already on HR Profile. Then, in the workday_worker_retriever class, there is the following code:

	/**
	 * If profile already exists with same first name, last name and
	 * personal email combination, then update the user for the profile
	**/
	var profile = this.getProfile(source);
	if (profile) {
		profile.employee_number = source.wd_employee_id;
		profile.update();
		this.updateUser(source, profile.user);
		target.user = profile.user;
		if (source.wd_terminated == "1" && source.wd_end_date < this.getTodayDate())
			this.terminateSysUser(target);
		return;
	}

God.

1. Another beauty: Hardcoding of columns using array indexes.

	var importFields = ["wd_primaryworkemail", "wd_full_legal_name", "wd_legal_first_name", "wd_legal_last_name", "wd_work_phone","wd_work_mobile_phone","wd_employee_id"];
	var userFields = ["email", "name", "first_name", "last_name", "phone", "mobile_phone","employee_number"];
	if (sysUser.get(userSysId)) {
		for (var i = 0; i < importFields.length; ++i) {
			var importField = importFields[i];
			var userField = userFields[i];
			if (sysUser[userField] != source[importField]) {
				updated = true;
				sysUser[userField] = source[importField];
			}
		}