Canvas enrollments.csv and add_sis_stickiness

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

Using a lightweight web server to debug requests

I’ve been working a lot with the Canvas API lately. One task was to add communication channels (e-mail addresses) to user accounts. I was able to add them successfully following the documentation’s cURL example using the skip_confirmation flag:

curl 'https://mycanvas.instructure.com/api/v1/users/[user id]/communication_channels'
-H "Authorization: Bearer [...]"
-d 'communication_channel[address]=chris@osric.com'
-d 'communication_channel[type]=email'
-d 'skip_confirmation=1'

However, when I ran the ColdFusion script I wrote, the user received notification of the addition even though the skip_confirmation flag was set:

<cfhttp url="https://mycanvas.instructure.com/api/v1/users/[user id]/communication_channels" method="post">
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Authorization" value="Bearer [...]" />
<cfhttpparam type="formfield" name="communication_channel[address]" value="chris@osric.com" />
<cfhttpparam type="formfield" name="communication_channel[type]" value="email" />
<cfhttpparam type="formfield" name="skip_confirmation" value="1" />
</cfhttp>

Why didn’t the latter work as expected?

I needed to be able to tell what was different about the 2 requests, but it would be difficult to capture that outbound requests. Tools like Fiddler and WireShark could help, but I was sending one request from my local machine and another from a remote web server.

My idea for capturing the request data was to send the request to a server under my control. I grabbed a Python echo server and modified it slightly to print the data received. Then, instead of sending the requests to the Canvas API I sent them to the echo server. Here are the results of the 2 requests:

cURL
POST / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.24.0 (i686-pc-cygwin) libcurl/7.24.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8t zlib/1.2.5 libidn/1.22 libssh2/1.3.0
Host: osric.com:50000
Accept: */*
Authorization: Bearer [...]
Content-Length: 100
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

communication_channel[address]=chris@osric.com&communications_channel[type]=email&skip_confirmation=1

ColdFusion
POST / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: ColdFusion
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Connection: close
Authorization: Bearer [...]
Content-Length: 118
Host: osric.com:50000

communication%5Fchannel%5Baddress%5D=chris%40osric%2Ecom&communications%5Fchannel%5Btype%5D=email&skip%5Fconfirmation=1

I noted the different content lengths for the same data, and upon closer inspection, ColdFusion was URL-encoding characters. I added the encoded attribute to the cfhttpparam tags with a value of “no”, and then the request bodies were identical:

<cfhttp url="https://mycanvas.instructure.com/api/v1/users/[user id]/communication_channels" method="post">
<cfhttpparam type="header" name="Authorization" value="Bearer [...]" />
<cfhttpparam type="formfield" encoded="no" name="communication_channel[address]" value="chris@osric.com" />
<cfhttpparam type="formfield" encoded="no" name="communication_channel[type]" value="email" />
<cfhttpparam type="formfield" encoded="no" name="skip_confirmation" value="1" />
</cfhttp>

Not surprisingly that solved the problem.