Help with User Role Identification via Canvas API
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
Hi everyone,
We’re integrating a self-hosted Canvas back-office with a frontend that fetches data via the API. While developing the authentication system, we encountered an issue with user roles.
Our assumption was that each user would have a single, clearly defined role (e.g., Student or Teacher). However, we’ve noticed that a user can be assigned to multiple courses with different roles—meaning the same account can be a Student in one course and a Teacher in another.
This creates a challenge when handling login authentication because the API doesn’t seem to return a definitive role for the user. Instead, roles seem to be course-specific.
API: POST /login/oauth2/token
Doc: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.oauth_endpoints.html#post-login-oauth2-token
Is this the expected behavior?
If so, how do you typically determine a user’s primary role within Canvas? Any best practices or API endpoints we should look into?
Thanks in advance for any insights!
Solved! Go to Solution.
- Mark as New
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Mute
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Permalink
- Report Inappropriate Content
@chriscas hits it right. User accounts are all the same; it's the user's enrollments in courses (student, teacher, TA, designer, observer) or in accounts (generally, account admin or institutionally defined roles) that determines their roles and permissions within the Canvas system.
Each user login can have a declared_user_type associated with it. Note that each user can have more than one login and the declared_user_type is a property of a particular login, not the particular user.
In practice, there's little difference, since each user usually has just one login and that login can define the user type. Therefore, one solution is for the institution to set the declared_user_type for each user, either by using the Canvas API to set the parameter for each user or by doing a SIS import of a users.csv file file that includes the declared_user_type column. Once each user has a declared_user_type, you can simple use the API to list the user's logins to get the info you're looking for.
If the institution is unwilling or unable to use the declared_user_type field, your fallback would be to list the user's enrollments and determine for yourself what role to report based on some rules you set. For example, your rule might be: "Everyone is either a teacher or a student. If the user has a teacher role in any course, they're a teacher; otherwise, they're a student." To implement this mechanism you could use this endpoint to list the user's teacher enrollments only:
GET /api/v1/users/:user_id/enrollments?type[]=TeacherEnrollment
If the response is empty, they're a student; if nonempty, they're a teacher.
Depending on the institution, there might be other workarounds. For example, at my daughter's school, faculty and staff have @school.edu email addresses, whereas students have @students.school.edu addresses.
By the way, the LTI specification handles this by reporting both the user's role(s) where they are in Canvas now (the current course or account context) as well as the global list of roles they have anywhere in the LMS.
In short, you'll probably need a combination of "knowing Canvas capabilities" and "understanding institutional policy and practices" to solve this issue.
