Speaker 1: Hey everyone, this is Chad Agarwal. I'm the owner of PerfectClicks LLC. We're a digital marketing agency based here in Parsippany, New Jersey. Today we're going to be talking about Cornerstone On-Demand Learning Management System. If you are familiar with Cornerstone, it's a very powerful platform to allow you to track a lot of your courses and sessions and learning, but they've also added on a lot of helpful features to basically manage an entire learning organization. Today we're working for a government organization. We are working really hard to make sure at the enterprise level that that organization needs advanced reporting capabilities. We're actually tying into their API and pulling out data and having it go to a website and other places as well. I do want to mention that Cornerstone has a very robust reporting system. Only if you need a very specific set of data, then you should be building out something that's more customized, some sort of software application. Do the reporting that you need based off of their API. Now, I will say they are doing a great job over there. They continue to improve on their documentation, the resources that they have available for developers, and I'll show you that in just a second. But before I do that, you really should get into OData queries and making sure that you can process your data, use a RESTful API, and authenticate with the system pretty easily. So, you should have some infrastructure before doing that. This video is basically going to go over all of the stuff that the API has to offer and what you can really do with it. You can build out different applications. You can export data to a cloud or to a live system. So, whatever you're looking to do, you can pretty much do it, but there are a few limitations with the system. So, I will show you how there are certain endpoints where you cannot get certain linking data, and that's okay because, you know, Cornerstone continues to improve the access to the data, the types of items and arrays that are available. And so, as long as you know how to navigate the system and the documentation, you should do a pretty good job of being able to find the right solution for your organization. So, if you are using the Cornerstone Learning Management System, I do recommend making the investment in their API so that you can build out any other applications and continue to get the reporting and data that you need to run your organization successfully. So, without further ado, let's jump into it and we'll walk you through it. All right. So, let's jump into it. This is the homepage for the Cornerstone for developers. You definitely can work with different use cases. They have a few examples here where you can assign training, view transcripts, or report results. These are typically the types of requests and the data formats that you're getting out of the API. This is an example response. And then you can, it's powered by different types of APIs within Cornerstone's framework. So, here you have the reporting framework, which is what we were working with for a government client of ours. And so, we were running through some OData queries, and then we're able to go through any, they have some great resources. If you had any issues, they have a frequently asked questions page, and then their documentations really come a long way, especially over the past year or so. They've continued to upgrade their site and make their documentation more accessible. So, for example, here you have the reporting guides and you have full documentation specific to the reporting, but also specific to training and transcripts. Now, within these technical documents, you can find pretty much all of the endpoints that you need, and then you can double check that those endpoints are working properly, or they have the proper join that you need to be able to link data between the two sets of endpoints. So, here's a good example. Let's say if you're working with a training or a course schedule or a course session, you can see here that you have the training schedule and you have the training session schedule, which indicates that you really want the information about a specific part of a session. And so, that's all of this data that comes through, the schedule ID, the session ID, all of that information is particular to that session, that specific session, and also that part. Now, as you can see here, there are various ways to join columns with different parts. Now, if your view or endpoint that you're working with does not have a join column, then you're really limited in terms of how much you can query and join at that point. So, if you look into the transcript report views relations table, you can see what the view name is and what your options are to join that column. So, in this case, if we wanted to pull a specific session ID or a specific scheduled session, which is right down here, you're going to have a hard time finding that join column because that option is not there to join to another data set. So, you're going to have to write that code separately or you're going to have to request for that API to be opened up. So, here's a great example where you have the training session or the training schedule that we were talking about here, but you don't necessarily have a join column for your other option, which is the training session schedule. So, if you're trying to iterate or extract data from a particular session, you may be limited to the items that are in this array of strings. Now, I do want to point out that this is something that could change in the future, but it's very helpful that Cornerstone has a great community that you can join. It's called the Cornerstone Success Program. Pardon me. It's called the Cornerstone Success Center. And so, it's a great community. They do help you out, the developers. It just takes a little bit of time, but you have a world of possibilities in terms of the applications and the type of integrations that you could build. You could build into your current website or into another web platform or into a cloud system or to a CRM. So, depending on your organization type, especially for enterprise and larger organizations, you need to have some sort of solutions or API integrations that can go into your existing platform. So, I do like Cornerstone. It's a great platform and they're doing a great job with their API. So, if you found this video helpful, please do leave us a like and subscribe for more videos on web development, app development, and custom software. And also, do reach out to us if you have any questions about developing any custom software for your organization. Our contact is info at perfectclicks.com. Please be sure to leave us a like and we'll see you in the next one.