Get admin roles through API

chriscas
Community Coach
Community Coach

Hi all, I'm hoping someone might be able to help me out, as I'm running in to some brick walls on a project...

I'm trying to create a javascript function to be used for customizations in our theme that will return what I refer to as a users roles in context...  What I mean by that is that if the user is on a page in course X which belongs in subaccount Z, my function would ideally return that user's role in course X, along with their roles in subaccount Z and any parents accounts of that, but not subccounts in different branches of the account structure.  This is similar to the ENV.current_user_roles variable, but my my function would include the actual roles (not just the types) and would be in context, unlike the ENV variable which essentially says the user is a teacher somewhere in the Canvas instance, but maybe not on the page that's loaded right now. I hope this makes sense...

I believe I have this working for course roles, but I'm running into a problem trying to list out admin roles.  I am currently using the admins api to call 'https://<instance>.instructure.com/api/v1/accounts/134/admins?user_id[]=ENV.current_user_id' if ENV.current_user_roles indicates the user has admin access somewhere.  This all works great using my account, which is a full root admin.  What I've discovered in testing is that that API call only seems to work if the user's admin role includes the "Admins add / remove" permission.  I want my function to work somewhat universally, and for many reasons, I can't give every one of our account roles the ability to add other admins.

Anyone have any suggestions on a different API call I could use for this purpose, or a different way to approach it?  I know enough javascript (and how to google things) to be dangerous, but I'm definitely not a full expert.  I know I could somehow use a root admin token to make the API call, but we definitely can't put a key like that in our javascript file that anyone can access.  This is my first time i'm trying to do API calls within the javascript file at all, so I could be approaching this completely incorrectly or inefficiently.  I'm hoping theres an easy solution for this that I just don't know the term to search and find though.

If anyone is interested, I put my rough code on my GitHub at https://github.com/cmcasey79/canvas-customizations-by-chris/blob/master/get_user_context_roles.js.

Thanks in advance for any help someone might be able to provide!

-Chris

Labels (2)
0 Likes
Users who also had this question