Updating avatar using Canvas API

[Jorge-Dev]

Hi eveveryone, 

I'm a developer and I'm automating the update of user avatars using the following endpoint (using Python 3):

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/users.html#method.users.update
PUT /api/v1/users/:id

We're having issues with some users not getting their avatar updated while others do. 

We are successfully sending the http request:

• as a parameter, i pass the token for the uploaded file that I want to set as the avatar
• this file is already successfully uploaded to the user's "profile pictures" directory.
• To remove any other variables, we uploaded the same image for each of the users
• we get a response, with status code of 200

However, we're not getting consistent results. 

In the http request response for each user, we see two scenarios:

1. Success - The first is when the avatar update is successful
   • the response text includes user details
   • in the details, i can confirm that the avatar has been updated to the corresponding photo matching the token sent
   • in there, I can also verify that the avatar state is locked, which is what we want
2. Not Updated - The second scenario is where the avatar is not updated
   • the status code is 200 for this also, no http error
   • the response text includes user details, but with fewer detail fields when compared to the details we get from scenario 1 above
   • in this scenario's details, we can see the avatar url is pointing to this particular file:   our_domain/images/messages/avatar-50.png
   • we have tried to see if there is a difference in the users that fail, but have not found anything that diffirentiates them
   • in addition, there have been times when some users who had their avatar updated successfully before (scenario 1 above), now fall under this 2nd scenario

We have only done this in our TEST environment. 

Any ideas on what is causing this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[dtod]

They're not hitting a user quota are they?

[moonlight412]

Did you figure out?

[coreyison]

Hello,

I know it's been a while and you've probably discovered a solution, however, I ran into this same issue writing a script to set the avatar url and lock the avatar state. If I tried to set both the state and url in one request, the url would revert to the default 'avatar-50.png'. My solution was to lock the avatar in one request and then set the avatar url in a separate request.

[MichaelLivermor]

Did you find a solution?