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Getting Started

Welcome to the documentation for Provincial Attestation Letter (PAL) SIS Integration. If you are not an existing customer or would like more information, please contact OCAS.

If this is your first time here, see the Overview article. If you are ready to start development to integrate with PAL, see Integration Approaches.

For more details on OCAS Provincial Attestation Letter (PAL) Service, please see: https://www.ocas.ca/what-we-do/OntarioAttestationLetterService.

Overview​

The PAL Integration service consists of a two-way API that allows for exchange of data between a college's SIS and OCAS' Ontario Attestation Letter Service (also referred to as "Provincial Attestation Letter" or PAL Service). The API provides the following capabilities:

  1. Requesting a PAL letter for an applicant.
  2. Receive the PAL letter (PDF) and associated PAL fields once the letter has been approved by MCU.

Currently DLI's use the DLI Portal in the OCAS' Ontario Attestation Letter Service to perform these actions manually. This API can replace those manual workflows and provides the following benefits:

  • Request a PAL "on demand", by initiating a request in your SIS.
  • Eliminate the need to complete Excel sheets with lists of students, thereby eliminating potential data entry errors and time delays for this manual work.
  • Automatically receive the PAL (and associcated data) in your SIS, once the letter has been generated and approved. This reduces the time needed for college staff to check the DLI portal daily and also reduces the effort in downloading and extracting zip files.

PAL SIS Integration has a similar security implementation that Domestic on Demand (DoD). OCAS base our security for those services on two elements that you could find here Authentication.

Integration Approaches​

PAL SIS integration is a modern solution that at its core provides a secure, Web API to facilitate two-way communication.

This wiki is set up to guide you through which pages you should read in order to develop your integration solution. As part of the PAL onboarding process and as you begin development, the PAL technical team can be engaged for additional guidance and to answer any technical questions as needed. Please reach out to OCAS' Customer Success team if you would like technical assistance.

Requesting API Access​

In order to access any of the PAL API environments you will need to have been issued credentials that your solution will use to request a Bearer token for request authorization.

OCAS will provide you information about the location of the OIDS and credentials for development purposes in a separate e-mail. If you do not yet have this information please have a representative from your college reach out to the OCAS Customer Success team.