VACOLS #

This page documents the VACOLS DB and its schema.

• VACOLS is the source of truth for Legacy Appeals.
• VACOLS GitHub repo
• DBDiagram of VACOLS table relationships
• VACOLS Data Dictionary spreadsheet copied from VACOLS.Database.tables.pdf (Last Updated: July 12, 2016). Ask for permission to edit via Google.
• Docs in the VACOLS repo
  • VACOLS Reference docs - VACOLS_Table_Joins.xls
  • Feb 2017 VACOLS doc in appeals-data repo - explanations of example queries
• FACOLS - “Fake VACOLS” used for local testing

Caseflow’s Rails Source Code for VACOLS DB #

Caseflow’s VACOLS Rails models

• appeal_repository.rb to query and update VACOLS
• case.rb has mappings of VACOLS values to more intuitive values
• legacy_appeal.rb - model that queries VACOLS for Legacy appeal info
• vacols_helper.rb - utility methods to handle VACOLS quirks
• associated_vacols_model.rb
  • vacols_attr_accessors will lazy load the underlying data from the VACOLS DB upon first call. For example, appeal = LegacyAppeal.find(id) will not make any calls to load the data from VACOLS, but soon as we call appeal.veteran_first_name, it will trigger the VACOLS DB lookup and fill in all instance variables for the appeal. Further requests will pull the values from memory and not do subsequent VACOLS DB lookups
  • AppealRepository.load_vacols_data calls set_vacols_values to load appeal (aka “case”) information from VACOLS.
• Location codes - in the code