Hello fellow Devs, I've been doing integration work on our universities lecture capture system. While using the API to List Courses for a User and including the term parameter, I get back the terms successfully, however the start_at field for all of the courses are null. When using Get a Single Course while including term it does successfully return the start_at field. Also, when I List Enrollment Terms I also get the correct start_at field. I've attached screenshots of the data retrieved from these calls. I've currently got a ticket logged with our Canvas support team to look into this issue. List Enrollment Terms Get a Single Course (not related to user) List courses for a user: So, my main question is have anyone had to deal with something like this? I assume this might be a bug, but am I missing something? Is there some sort of inheritance that would lend itself to overwriting the start_at field on the List Courses for a User level instead of the Get a Single Course level? Thanks, Jerry EDIT: I've added green boxes around the course start/end date. If those were available, I wouldn't even have to worry about the terms. Hopefully I can get an answer from the migration team on why they don't exist in the first place. Thanks everyone!

?include[]=term for List Courses for a User behaving inconsistently

Hello fellow Devs,

I've been doing integration work on our universities lecture capture system. While using the API to List Courses for a User and including the term parameter, I get back the terms successfully, however the start_at field for all of the courses are null. When using Get a Single Course while including term it does successfully return the start_at field. Also, when I List Enrollment Terms I also get the correct start_at field. I've attached screenshots of the data retrieved from these calls. I've currently got a ticket logged with our Canvas support team to look into this issue.

List Enrollment Terms

284274_Get Terms.png

Get a Single Course (not related to user)

284275_Get Single Course.png

List courses for a user:

284276_Get Courses for User.png

So, my main question is have anyone had to deal with something like this? I assume this might be a bug, but am I missing something? Is there some sort of inheritance that would lend itself to overwriting the start_at field on the List Courses for a User level instead of the Get a Single Course level?

Thanks,

Jerry

EDIT:

I've added green boxes around the course start/end date. If those were available, I wouldn't even have to worry about the terms. Hopefully I can get an answer from the migration team on why they don't exist in the first place. Thanks everyone!

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Accepted answers

James

Here's are more details about what I'm seeing

Here are the course listings for me, where I'm an instructor.

The items in the red rectangles with square corners are for the course. The items in the green rectangle with rounded corners are for the term.

The term dates do not match the start and end of the term, which in our case mostly correspond to the dates in the red boxes for the course because we specify the dates for the course based on the term dates.

The dates in the green box are for the term and the start_date is null because we don't limit access before the course for the instructor in the Admin > Terms page.

Here is the same course for a student

This time, the term settings match the term settings for a student. We set the course start to the start of the term, while the end of the term is a few days after the end of the course.

I think pklove is probably right as it would be really easy to miss the "term" heading and think the "start_at" applied to the course rather than the term.

All comments

James

@j_causby

Your screenshots didn't come through. Without researching this, it does sound a little like an issue I had. I asked Canvas about it and got an answer back that it wasn't a bug, it was a misunderstanding on my part. It had something to do with the dates being for the user and not the course. If a teacher could access the course from whenever, because there is no date specified in the terms (Admin > Terms), then it would come back as null.

pklove

I just tried getting the courses for a user with the include term parameter:

/api/v1/users/sis_user_id:some_id/courses?include[]=term

and the course dates seem to have come back fine. Certainly not null.

James

Here's are more details about what I'm seeing

Here are the course listings for me, where I'm an instructor.

The items in the red rectangles with square corners are for the course. The items in the green rectangle with rounded corners are for the term.

The dates in the green box are for the term and the start_date is null because we don't limit access before the course for the instructor in the Admin > Terms page.

Here is the same course for a student

This time, the term settings match the term settings for a student. We set the course start to the start of the term, while the end of the term is a few days after the end of the course.

I think pklove is probably right as it would be really easy to miss the "term" heading and think the "start_at" applied to the course rather than the term.

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