Incremental imports

Early Access release

Incremental imports bring data for workers that Workday identifies as updated since the last incremental import. Changes must be in the base or non-effective future-dated custom attributes for the worker to be included. Changes to effective-dated custom attributes alone do not trigger an incremental import. Included in the incremental import are base attributes, non-future, and future effective-dated custom attributes. Schedule incremental imports at an interval that supports regular business processes. Typically, incremental imports should run at least once per day and can be scheduled as frequently as once an hour.

Prerequisites

Enable Workday Provisioning features.

Procedure

  1. Perform a regular import as follows:
    • In Okta, select the Import tab for the Workday app.
    • Click Import Now.
    • First, run a full import to create a baseline for future incremental imports. Select the Full Import option, then click Import:
    • Now you can run an incremental import, by selecting the Incremental Import option, then click Import:
  2. Now any scheduled imports will be incremental by default, to set up scheduled imports follow the instructions:

  3. Select the Provisioning tab for the Workday app.
  4. Select To Okta in the left pane under SETTINGS.
  5. In the General section, use the Schedule Import drop-down menu to set the schedule for the frequency at which you would like further imports to run. This causes the subsequent scheduled import to be an incremental import that will only pick up changes since the previous Workday import.

Considerations

Important things to note while using incremental imports:

  • The Pre-Start interval is applied to the time since the last download.

    For example, if today is January 10th with the Pre-Start interval set to 10 days and the last import was January 7th, the import will look to workers from the 7th to the 17th. If you select Import Now, the date will change to today's date and look 10 days in the future.

  • Same-day deactivations should be entered into Workday before the next incremental import is scheduled to run.

  • Changes must be in the base or non-effective future-dated custom attributes for the worker to be included. Changes to effective dated custom attributes alone don’t trigger an incremental import.

  • All user fields are imported with an incremental import.

  • Incremental imports and Workday Provisioning Groups:

    • Incremental imports bring in any new Workday Provisioning groups and create them in Okta.
    • Incremental imports update group memberships for any relevant users or groups.
    • Incremental imports do NOT remove empty or deleted Workday Provisioning groups from Okta. Only a full import removes groups from Okta.