File validation

When you submit a file it goes through the following stages of validation:

• File level validation checks that the file is structured correctly
• Simple validation checks that are applied to the submitted record(s)
• Complex validation checks that are applied to the resulting new or updated record(s) after the record merging process

Once processing is complete, you will see the submission summary page.

The new system processes each record one at a time and accepts any records that pass validation. It will only reject a whole file if it is not structured correctly.

For XML files it is expecting the data items to be named as per the schema and to be in the correct order. You can leave a data item blank in the file or omit it completely as long as the remaining items are still in the correct order. For a CSV file the system is expecting no headers and 54 fields if you are submitting the v2.1 data set.

Validation errors are listed by NHS number. If errors or warnings are generated during processing your file you can view them on the Submission Summary screen by clicking on the NHS number(s) displayed.

You can use the download all validation button to download all the validation error message into a CSV file so you can review them offline.

The records submitted section provides a summary of the outcome of the submission. How many records were submitted and how many were rejected and accepted.

The system will try to tell you everything that is wrong with a record in one go. This is not always possible, so it will carry out the simple validations first, most of these are checking the format and length of the values for each data item.

The system will check the record against every simple validation rule and if there are one or more errors generated it will reject the record and tell you about all the errors at this stage.

These are mainly cross field checks or where we need to check that a code is valid.

These rules are applied after the record merging process to ensure that any merged or updated records are still valid, therefore the record must have passed all the simple validation rules to get to this stage. Again, the system will run through all these rules for each record and attempt to tell you about everything that is wrong with the record.

Note that one problem may trigger a number of validation rules.

The system generates both errors and warnings.

Errors are shown when a mandatory validation rule has been broken, therefore a record with at least one error will be rejected.

Warnings mean that your record could be improved but the system will accept it, as long as there are no validation errors. We may use warnings to tell you when your record would fail a new rule we are going to be introducing or warn you of something illogical in the data.

If you have a lot of errors / warnings to review or want to do this later or offline you can download all the error messages into a CSV file and save this locally.

We have produced a validations rules document which provides more information about validations messages and what they mean.

Find previous submissions

You can find a list of all submissions made by your organisation by selecting submission history from the top tool bar.  This shows you all the file submissions, who submitted them and when. You can filter this list by various filter options.

By clicking on the detail link you can get to the submission summary screen which will show you any validation errors and warnings for that submission.