Get full list of Canvas Users

[MikeBrinkman]

I'm working on a project using Python to get our user photos posted as avatars in Canvas. I have it working fine for a small list of users defined in a CSV file on my computer, so that's probably the biggest hurdle.

Our user photos are stored as 'SIS_ID.jpg', but to upload the user photos, we have to know the Canvas ID.  What I'd like to do is grab the full list of users from Canvas, then I can generate the CSV file used for the rest of the process. With the Canvas ID, I can write the lines of the file as 'canvasid, sisid.jpg, jpeg'.

It seems like this would be fairly easy to figure out, but I'm still new the the whole API concept.

[JamesSekcienski]

@MikeBrinkman 

You could run the Provisioning report in the root account and select users to get a report with all the users Canvas IDs and their SIS IDs.

Also, have you tried using their SIS ID for the API call rather than looking up their Canvas ID?  To use the SIS ID, instead of the Canvas ID, you would need to prefix the SIS ID with sis_user_id:

Here is a reference on using the SIS ID:  Object IDs, SIS IDs, and special IDs - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation (instructure.com)

[MikeBrinkman]

@JamesSekcienski, thanks! That would make it a bit easier, since I already have the SIS ID's, and would remove the necessity of even having to write a file and writing the search loop. B-)

[MikeBrinkman]

@JamesSekcienski , turns out I didn't need that anyway. Examining the code more closely, it is using sis_user_id already. I was able to use Python to pull data from our users.csv file, generate a csv file & upload photos. Now I just have to figure out why it's choking after about 450 users. Is it possible this is rate limiting on our test server? The error I'm getting is MissingSchema: Invalid URL 'None': No schema supplied. Perhaps you meant http://None?

[JamesSekcienski]

@MikeBrinkman, I'm glad to hear that the sis_user_id is already in use in your program.  That was definitely a nice surprise when I discovered that feature.

Since you are uploading files, you may be reaching a rate limit, especially if it only starts happening after about 450 students.  Although, I haven't seen that error in the past when the cause was a rate limit issue.  You should receive a 403 error for rate limit issues:  https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.throttling.html

Based on the error message you have listed there it seems like the URL isn't being provided to the request at that point.  Have you tried logging and using a try-catch so you can log details about the ones that fail and still be able to continue process?

[MikeBrinkman]

@JamesSekcienski , I figured it out. It was throwing an error on some users who didn't exist in test yet. One of the perils of the test environment being a month behind the production environment. I did put a try-except-continue command in the code so it just ignored those and logged the users who didn't exist. Thanks again for all your help!

[JamesSekcienski]

@MikeBrinkman I'm glad you were able to figure it out and that using the try-except-continue helped you log and skip over the errors.  I've run into similar problems when testing scripts on the test server, especially when it involves processing changes to courses.