Forum Discussion

DarylBeaumont's avatar
DarylBeaumont
New Contributor
7 years ago

WorkDay Snap Pack - What's your experince?

Hello,

My organisation is currently looking into the Workday Snap pack. We’ve had some initial conversations about what’s offered and read through some of the documentation, but we were wondering if anyone had any insight into actually using the Snap pack?

We’re mainly looking to see whether using the Snaps helped or augmented pipeline development, as well as any stumbling blocks you might of hit along the way. We would also like to know if you used the Snaps primarily through development, or whether you used other Snaps to communicate with Workday, such as REST and SOAP.

Any feedback is much appreciated!

Thank you,

Daryl Beaumont

2 Replies

  • jcampion's avatar
    jcampion
    New Contributor III
    7 years ago

    Hi Daryl,
    We use the Workday Snap Pack. Prior to that, we wrote java code to use their SOAP API. Each API update required code changes. If you are familiar with that API you will know that many calls return very nested XML that makes it hard to pull the fields you want. The Workday Snap Pack coupled with a mapper makes this task simple.

    In the Workday Read snap there’s a “simplified output” checkbox which can help significantly with extra info, or you can leave that cleared to get the full results. Also, it can do the paging for you.

    When Workday releases a new API version, you just update the value in the account used to access Workday to update to that version.

    You can read reports using the Snaplogic REST GET snap. Sometimes that’s preferable because a report can return exactly what you need without having to make multiple calls and join the results together. Also, you can give access to certain data without exposing other (say title but not salary) that you might not have as fine control within Workday. But, you must maintain the report.

    We use both (Workday Snap and REST) in production.
    I’d be happy to answer any other questions if I can help.

    • Judy
  • del's avatar
    del
    Contributor III
    7 years ago

    We have used the Workday Snap Pack since its beginning. The snap pack has been very beneficial for us in simplifying and quickening development. In addition to Judy’s comments above, the suggest feature of the Workday snaps comes in very handy in navigating Workday’s complex schema.

    We do also use the REST and SOAP snaps for Workday. We use the SOAP snap in a few special cases where the Velocity template language provides a better option than the core snaps for handling specific logic. We use REST snaps to extract data from the web-enabled Workday reports.