I work in IT at a university and I'm working with about 5 different departments to develop a new process for students to apply to a specific school within the university (not the university as a whole).  We're using a  web-based college application vendor and adding the applicant questions for the school itself to the main university application.  Currently the main application feeds into PeopleSoft.  The IT staff here is building a new table to hold just our school's applicant data.  I want to be able to access that data from PeopleSoft for use in external applications, but our IT staff doesn't really seem to understand what I'm requesting, as they simply tell me I can have access to the PS query tools.  The problem is, I don't want to run just ad hoc queries, I want to be able to connect from outside PeopleSoft and show current data within the external app.I am unable to find documentation or get a clear answer to my question.  Does PeopleSoft support access via a web services API or anything similar, and does that sound like the right direction for me to take?
How can I pull data from PeopleSoft on demand?
web services
All that is needed to query the PeopleSoft database is to install the PeopleTools 2-tier client (aka the development tools) on a PC.  The client will install an ODBC driver from which you can then create a DSN. Your application can then communicate with PeopleSoft through the DSN connection.  Technically you don't need the development tools (and the IT staff probably doens't want to give you the dev tools), but that's ok, all you really need is the ODBC driver.  You will also need to work with the IT staff (in particular the DBA) to set up a user account in the database granting you the necessary permissions to the tables that must be queried.  And finally ... you will need to have an understanding of the database schema so you may build your query statements.  PeopleSoft has thousands! of tables and thousands! of views.  Your query will most certainly involve more than just the one table that the IT staff is creating for you.Not for the faint of heart, but the full PeopleTools 8.52 documentation can be found on Oracle's web site:  http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E25741_01/psft/html/docset.html