SIS Imports and Diffing Mode

[millerjm]

We have a ruby script that handles the simple SIS Imports, but only for the full import, not in diffing mode.  We are confused about how we can get this to work using Diffing mode.  Our import file has >100K enrollments  and approx 30K users and takes a really long time to process.  We would like to enable Diffing mode in order to speed this up.  I think we can make it work for enrollments. 

I'm concerned about this part of the documentation:  If user B is created by import 1, and then user B is omitted from import 2, Canvas will mark the user as deleted.

Is this correct?  We do not want to ever delete users as we understand that this would delete all associated data.  Would this mean that we probably wouldn't be able to use Diffing mode for the Users file, which is >30K users?

Thanks,

Joni

[kevin · Accepted solution]

That would be correct. Diffing mode is designed to decrease processing time and handle adds, drops, deletes, etc by simply identifying what has changed as compared to the last import for that diffing id.

In an ideal world, you would have a way to filter (by date or status or something like that) for user records in your Student Information System that have changed and only upload those. However, many student information systems make this difficult or impossible. This problem is, in part, what diffing mode is designed to solve.