Manage Backfill

You can run Backfill as a separate process using Backfill Management. There are certain situations that can occur during Realtime Backfill that mandate using Backfill Management. Specifically, attendance being changed for a week in which backfill was already applied or student's being withdrawn from classes in the middle of the week can result in backfill calculations being incorrect. The proper way to ensure that the calculations are correct and that all backfill has been applied for the backfill period is to run the Validate Backfill function. This function performs these three tasks:

Corrects any miscalculations that may have occurred due to attendance changes made to weeks that already had backfill applied.
Corrects any orphaned backfilled records caused by student's withdrawing from classes or withdrawing from the continuation education program.
Performs the backfill process for any students who may not have had backfilled applied. This typically occurs if the option for Realtime Backfill has not been enabled in the school's attendance preferences page.

The Backfill process must be run whether or not Realtime Backfill has been enabled to ensure that calculations have been correctly applied for all students. The process performs quickly if Realtime Backfill is enabled, since only exception students are recalculated. If Realtime Backfill is not enabled or has not been used during the backfill period, the backfill process calculates backfill for each student who has enrolled in the continuation education program during the backfill period.

When running the Backfill process, you have two options. The first option is to run the Validate Backfill function, which runs all three tasks of clearing backfill, regenerating attendance aggregation, and running backfill in succession for all students in the selected school. The second option is to run the three tasks separately, which allows you to run the process for all or a selected group of students to perform corrections and problem diagnosis.

Backfill should be run prior to running the California's Alternative Education reports. Refer to the California State Reporting Attendance and Membership Report Guide available on PowerSource.

Manage Backfill

Option 1 – One-Step Backfill Process

Option 2 – Three-Step Backfill Process