I have an enrollments.csv file for Instructure’s Canvas LMS, and I want all of the enrollments in it to “stick”–that is, to survive a batch mode SIS import. These are primarily course designers, and so they have no official standing in the class–and therefore are not in our database, and therefore are not included with regular updates to enrollments.
According to the Canvas documentation for SIS imports:
add_sis_stickiness – Boolean
This option, if present, will process all changes as if they were UI changes. This means that “stickiness” will be added to changed fields. This option is only processed if ‘override_sis_stickiness’ is also provided.
Source: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/sis_imports.html#method.sis_imports_api.create
However, experience tells me otherwise. An inquiry to Instructure’s support confirms that add_sis_stickiness does not apply to enrollments. Enrollments added this way will be deleted following the next enrollments batch import.
The choices to preserve these course designer enrollments are basically to add each one manually using the web UI, or add them via the API. Either option will make the enrollments “stick.”
I opted to use the API. Since I already had a formatted input file, I wrote a short BASH script (with the help of several man pages and a couple StackOverflow pages) that reads the CSV and processes each row, adding the enrollment via the API:
headerrow=1
while read row; do
if [ $headerrow -eq 0 ]
then
# get the SIS course ID
cid="$(echo $row | cut -d',' -f1)"
# get the SIS user ID
uid="$(echo $row | cut -d',' -f2)"
# get the role / enrollment type
type="$(echo $row | cut -d',' -f3)"
# reformat the enrollment type
tid="$(echo $type | cut -c1 | tr [[:lower:]] [[:upper:]])""$(echo $type | cut -c2-)"Enrollment
echo course is $cid
echo user is $uid
echo type is $tid
result="$(curl https://[yourcanvassite].instructure.com/api/v1/courses/sis_course_id:$cid/enrollments -H 'Authorization: Bearer [REDACTED]' -X POST -F enrollment[type]=$tid -F enrollment[user_id]=sis_user_id:$uid -F 'enrollment[enrollment_state]=active' -F 'enrollment[notify]=false')"
echo $result
fi
headerrow=0
done <enrollments.csv
A web development company that I have worked with before has decided that they are interested in licensing a web-framework that I have developed. They are probably going to go forward and use it on a _lot_ of projects (well that’s certainly what I hope) and I will get a small cut each time they deploy it. I’m really super excited about seeing my code deployed this way, as well as by the prospect of passive income.
Over the Last several days, have been pounding away on a CMS that really takes it’s inspiration from some of the work that Chris did for U-Penn. (It is also partially inspired by cake, and by joomla.) The idea is for the app to be as easy to install and use as is humanly possible. At the same time I expect that some more impressive things will need to be done by more advanced users, so I have sub-divided usage patterns out into 5 levels.
I just thought I would drop this little tidbit to help save someone some time (hopefully). In the smarty template engine there is a pretty useful call “register_prefilter” which basically lets you pass a function to smarty that gets run on the whole template file before the template file itself has any of the substitutions made to it. This can be a god-send, however the first time you use it it probably won’t seem like it’s working. The secret is that you need to go into your templates_c directory, and dump all of the compiled templates every time you change the pre-filter.