Support Center was getting lots of calls from students. They issued an alert after contacting Laurie Miller in University Registrar.

Students who has previously registered for Fall 2021 classes were not able to get to the registration page to review and/or change their registration.

Student Registration 9 uses functionality called Action Item Processing (AIP). AIP allows administrators to have items pop-up when a student goes to registration and blocks them from proceeding until they take an action. For example, students are preventing from registering until they agree to pay for the classes that they are about to register for.

In response to COVID and virtual classes, Office of University Registrar (OUR) created an AIP item for a student to declare their physical location where they will be taking classes. This was first implemented for the Fall 2020 term.

Prior to this alert, some students were having issues registering for Fall 2021 classes if they had never answered the Fall 2020 Physical Location AIP. The Fall 2020 AIP was in a “pending” state which blocks access to registration but it was beyond the display-end-date so it was not displaying for students. OUR created an additional status for AIPs (“No Response”) and submitted ticket 175617 to the DBAs asking them to run a script which moved all the pending Fall 2020 Physical Location AIPs to the “no response” status.

AIP only allows there to be one pending item for each type. This meant that the students who has not answered the Fall 2020 Physical Location AIP did not get an Fall 2021 Physical Location AIP to answer. In order to issue these AIPs, OUR removed the time tickets for Fall 2021 registration and reissued them. This triggered the creation of pending Fall 2021 Physical Location AIP for those who did not have one.

The unintended consequence of re-issuing the time tickets and AIPs is that a new pending AIP was created for those who had previously completed one. Since AIP does not allow one person to have two of the same AIP in the same state, when a student who previously completed the AIP attempted to complete the new one, AIP could not update the new one to “complete”. Since it stayed in a pending state, students were blocked from accessing registration. Approximately 18,000 students were potentially affected but it is not known how many actually attempted to complete the second pending AIP on May 14, 2021.

OUR created a second script to remove the pending Physical Location Fall 2021 AIP from those who had already completed one. This was run by the DBAs per ticket 175734.

OUR will be developing (or requesting EA to develop) a program to move pending AIPs to the “no response” status once the display-end-date has passed. This program will run on a regular schedule. This will allow a pending AIP to be created when time tickets are first issued so students will only have one to complete.