API error

Hello,

I am new to canvas API script writing and have been using a script from the canvas scripts in github called pull_course_grades.php. I have a course that I want to get the final grade from that has 130 students enrolled. The script I am using is pull_course_grades and has two steps. Step one to get the list of students enrolled and step 2 to get their final grade. The first step returns the list of students, but the second step returns an error 'too many students'. I assume this is telling me I have too many students in the class to return the final grade for. When I use another course with much smaller enrollment, step 2 works fine.

The question I have is I am not sure how to avoid the error when getting the final grade when I have a large number enrolled? I have searched the community site, but have not really found how to solve this. Is there a filter parameter or field that I can limit what is sent back?

Thank you,

Mark Panning

Creighton University

DOIT - Division of Information Technology

Phone: 402-280-2418

Email: marpan@creighton.edu

Tech Tip: "Never Share your password with anyone, ever."

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Accepted answers

unknown

Wanted to report back that I got this, my first canvas script working to pull the computed_final_grade of each student in the rather large course. Thank you all for your help.

Thank you,

Mark

All comments

MattHanes

If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with pagination. You might have to modify the code to handle large numbers of students. Sometimes these little scripts will cheat by setting the "per_page" to 100 or 50 instead of properly using the pagination links. I'm not as familiar with PHP as I am with Python so I hope that helps move you in the right direction.

Pagination - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation

ColinMurtaugh

Here's the code in Canvas that's returning the error message that you're getting:

canvas-lms/submissions_api_controller.rb at e07336c91a70c6c22a34790d2ca98025e0440eab · instructure/canvas-lms · GitHub

It'll give that error if the number of student IDs that you pass in is greater than the limit on the maximum number of results per page. This API call works a bit differently than most of the other calls that return lists of results (which would normally just be paginated), but you can work around the problem by breaking up the list of student IDs into a few chunks.

For example, if the first call to get the students in the course returns 130 records, you could break it up into batches of, say, no more than 50 for the second call.

Here's some code based on Matt Hanes' code (thanks, Matt!) that chunks the student_id list into sets of 50 before fetching the submissions:

get_submissions.py · GitHub

Note that I picked a chunk size of 50 arbitrarily; that works fine today, but Instructure does reserve the right to change their max_page_size in the future. Not likely, but something to be aware of. If that were to happen you'd need to revise the chunk size accordingly.

Good luck!

--Colin

garth

@markpanning ‌ if you have the course_id, you can get a list of enrollments which includes the course grade:

Enrollments - List enrollments

The API call will return a list of "enrollments":

Enrollments - Enrollment object

Of particular interest to what you are doing are the following variables:

"computed_current_score"
"computed_final_score"
"computed_current_grade"
"computed_final_grade"

Make sure you understand the difference between the "current" and "final" score/grade. Basically if there are any ungraded assignments in the gradebook, the "current" value will be different from the "final" value. We run a gradebook sanity check at the mid-term and end of each semester to alert faculty to this potential significant error before they report their grades.

It is also important to note that if a grading scheme has not been applied, the "grade" variables will be blank, i.e. there will be no letter grade assigned.

I hope this is helpful.

unknown

Wanted to report back that I got this, my first canvas script working to pull the computed_final_grade of each student in the rather large course. Thank you all for your help.

Thank you,

Mark

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