Workday Finance: Workday EIB

Saturday, 9 May 2020

Workday EIB - Outbound

EIB Outbound

The Workday Enterprise Interface Builder (EIB) tool provides an easy-to-use graphical and guided interface to define inbound and outbound integrations without requiring any programming.

There are two types of EIBs - Inbound and Outbound. Here we will discuss about EIB Outbound.

Outbound EIBs are used to extract data from the Workday system and send it to external system that could be a third party, vendor, legacy system or just a simple attachment. Mostly they are used to send a file to an external destination via ftp.

Here are the three steps / phases involved in creating an Outbound EIB:

1. Get Data

In "Get Data" Phase, we will identify the data source. In 90% of the cases, this is will be a custom report and it should be an advanced report which acts as Report as a Service (RaaS).

If you are specifying a Report Data Source, you can choose the format in which the report results can be delivered.

Below are the different output formats: XML, simplified XML, CSV, JSON, GData, or RSS.

You can also use Workday Web Service endpoint as the data source for an EIB.

2. Transform

This is used to transform the data from one format to other. You can either choose from the set of predefined (XSL) transforms, or specify a new one that you will define. The out-of-the-box options include transforms to CSV and Excel formats.This is an optional step if you do not want to transform anything. By default your EIB will produce an XML format.

When you use Custom Report as your Data source, you can make use of the Delivered Transformation or Custom Transformation. And when you use Web Service on the other hand, you will have only one option Custom Transformation.

Like said above, you can use None option if you don't want to transform.

New Custom Report Transformation: This is the delivered one's, it will allow you to use it for the first time, it will automatically create the transformation for your EIB. One you select this option, you will not see this later, It will become Custom Report Transformation.

Custom Report Transformation: Same as above.

Custom Transformation: This is the custom transformation where you will write a XSLT for your XML and upload the same.

3. Deliver

The output resulting from executing the EIB can either be attached back to your tenant, or alternatively delivered to an external endpoint.

Supported Delivery Methods are: Workday Attachment, FTP, HTTP/SSL, FTP/SSL, FTP, Email, AS2

You can configure multiple delivery options for different tenants, For example - for production you may configure PGP Production Key and for non production tenants you may configure PGP non-Production Key. Additionally you can use Workday attachment to be delivered to the local tenant where the EIB is ran.