Adding secondary logins

[mzimmerman]

We're interested in adding a secondary login to our campus Canvas user accounts, to facilitate inter-campus logins between the different campuses in our system.

The process/format for using SIS Import to create secondary logins is pretty straightforward ( https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.sis_csv.html ).  However, we are finding that when we add a new login via SIS Import, that login automatically gets identified as the primary login, which impacts the user info that is passed to LTIs and external integrations.  

That's not what we're looking for.  We want to keep the original login_id that is sent with users feed as the primary, and just add a secondary login that can be used for authentication.  I can do it with the API, similar to the way we do it via the GUI for individual users, but that doesn't really work for our user creation/management workflow.

The underlying issue seems to be that a login_id which is added that includes a new user_sis_id (required for SIS Import) automatically gets set to be the primary login_id.

Has anyone else tried this, and found a workaround for this behavior?

[NicoletteStaley · Accepted solution]

@mzimmerman I find it interesting that you are seeing only the primary login_id being reported to and LTI.  I believe that typically a object is set to an LTI on launch that contains a User object containing multiple identifiers that can be used by the LTI to determine a match.  You may want to verify that the configuration of the LTI isn't such that only one piece of identifying information is sent for the user.  You may want to also consider using an authentication for your secondary logins and then configuring the LTI so that the login_id for the particular authentication provider is sent for the user.  Since there are so many different configurations for LTIs that might be used, you may want to contact the provider of the LTI on the issue as well to see how they identify a user with the information sent by Canvas at launch.

[mzimmerman]

Hi @NicoletteStaley 

We're looking for a solution that keeps the primary login the same in Canvas so that we don't have to worry about trying to fix things for each of the LTIs on our system.

Fortunately, we came up with a script to add the secondary login via API rather than an SIS feed, so it doesn't require an SIS_ID for the new login and doesn't switch the new login over to being primary.