Using Workday RaaS to Extract Data
Workday has a Reporting as a Service (RaaS) interface which allows you to export most data from Workday by creating a custom report within Workday then exposing it as a web service. The output can be various formats such as RSS, XML or JSON format and you can even modify the filters within the URI.
RaaS are faster because they are pre-gathered because the actual data gathering happens in Workday cloud whenever the report runs and delivered as the preferred output format of XML or JSON. That’s why it’s faster.
Reports are a live look into Workday, and pulls the data as of the current moment just like the WWS which is used by the Workday snap.
If you depend on live data, use the Workday snap. Also remember that using reports you’re just shifting the load-debt. It’s still calling Workday, just at a time you may or may not be expecting instead of at the time of the call.
Below are high-level instructions on how to retrieve data from Workday within SnapLogic using Workday’s RaaS interface.
Step 1 - Create Custom Report in Workday
- You need to login to a Workday instance
- Click on Reporting & Analytics Button
- Click on Create Custom Report
- Provide some Report Name
Report Type: Advanced
Data Source: Journal Lines
- Under Custom Report
Data Source Filter: Journal Lines for Financial Reporting and Reporting Time Period
- Under Columns
Journal Number
Company
Accounting Date
Ledger/Budget Debit Amount
Ledger/Budget Credit Amount
Ledger Currency
Journal Source
Ledger
Line Memo
Created By
Be sure to share it with the account that you are querying the report with.
Some reports Data Sources will enable filters on them so that the data retrieved is indexed and offers some performance benefits.
In this report it will prompt you to enable Data source filter
Now click on the Prompts tab to populate the default prompts.
Once the checkbox is clicked, the prompt defaults are populated. Accept the defaults and if you wish to change the names, please do rename that makes sense for your project.
Click OK at bottom to save
Step 2 - Ask customer what data do they want.
The default behavior is to pull the data as of the current moment. If the customer has a different requirement then please follow this link (Workday Report Data Prompts) to understand how you can control what type of data can be pulled from Workday reports. The above behavior is only possible with Workday Advanced Reports.
Step 3 - Get Web Service URL
Next to the name of your custom report you’ll see a button … click it and under Actions select Web Services and View URLs
You need to set filters for the ones that are mandatory (red asterisk *)
Period: 2013 - Jan
Ledger: Actuals
Amount Type: Activity
Time Period: Current Period
Company: Global Modern Services, Inc. (USA)
Click OK button
Workday delivers in multiple formats. (REST - Workday XML, WSDL, JSON, etc).
Choose the format you like and copy the URL.
It is important to copy the URL for that specific format.
REST
JSON
https://wd2-impl-services1.workday.com/ccx/service/customreport2/tenant_name/nganapathiraju/NG_Journ...
Refresh URL it will download the report in JSON format after you enter the credentials
Step 4 - Create SnapLogic Pipeline to access URL
- Download Get WD Report.slp included on this page
- Import pipeline into SnapLogic
- Modify REST - Get Snap
- Change Service URL to the URL from Step 2
- Create New Account - Basic Auth
- Enter your Workday Username and Password
- Validate Pipeline
- You should see preview data
- Note you might need to change Mapper if you are using different fields
The sample pipeline with basic structure
Get WD Report.slp (5.6 KB)
Thanks for this post, This is Karthi, I am part of Data Engineering Team, we have Workday in our company, we are facing performance issue on downloading the WD web enabled URL in CSV file format.
We have SSIS ETL tool where we use script task (C#) to hit WD web enabled URL to download the files, last couple of month we are facing some performance issue in this task, some times this task is running longer, generally this will complete in 10 mins but sometime its running in Hours/days and timed out finally.
We checked with SQL Server side there server performance is good, but we are not able to find why this download part is running longer and timed out, it will really helpful if you have some suggestion on this, and is there any alternative way to download the WD reports data in file formats?
