What's New in v6.1

This section provides an overview of the new features in v6.1 of the Ed-Fi ODS / API for Tech Suite 3, targeted at deployment starting in the 2023–2024 school year. A comprehensive list of all changes is in the Release Notes section. 

The changes include:

Detail about each change follows. 

Improvements & Enhancements

This section briefly describes the new features and enhancements built into the Ed-Fi ODS / API Platform v6.1 and provides links to additional documentation. 

Data Model Changes

ODS / API v6.1 implements Ed-Fi Data Standard v4.0, which brings minor changes that are intended to be non-breaking to most API clients. Even though there are no breaking changes between Ed-Fi Data Standard v4.0 and the previous Ed-Fi Data Standard v4.0-a, Ed-Fi Data Standard v4.0-a introduced some breaking changes to the core data model for domains commonly used by student information systems (e.g., the Grade & Gradebook entities), assessment systems, and finance systems. Implementers are advised to review the changes carefully. Refer to What's New - v4.0 for details. Platform hosts should also be aware that there are database changes and changes to build and deployment pipelines in the previous ODS / API v6.x release.

GitHub Action Builds

ODS / API v6.1 release provides continuous integration (CI) directly in the source code repositories via GitHub Actions. Previously, build infrastructure was configured via an on-premises TeamCity server behind a VPN. Apart from moving to infrastructure as code, this change brings cost savings to API hosts who currently maintain infrastructure for running the builds by providing free GitHub hosted virtual machines to run the builds. This change also allows transparency to code contributors by providing details on the builds and build failures. See the builds in action in the following repository links:

• Ed-Fi-ODS/actions
• Ed-Fi-ODS-Implementation/actions

PowerShell 7 Upgrade

The ODS / API source code repositories contain PowerShell scripts that are useful for development, build, and deployment of the ODS / API components. In previous releases, these PowerShell scripts required PowerShell 5.0 and Windows environments for execution. The ODS / API v6.1 release upgrades these PowerShell scripts to PowerShell 7.0, an open-source cross-platform edition of PowerShell while maintaining backward compatibility with PowerShell 5.0. This release also includes modifications for running the scripts on a Unix-like environment. With this change, ODS / API supports cross-platform build environments along with cross-platform runtime environments. 

MetaEd IDE v3.2

Implementing extensions in ODS / API v6.1 requires implementers to update to MetaEd IDE v3.2.