SIS Import: "No short_name given for course"

[bgibson]

This is more of a "heads up" than a discussion, and it didn't fit as a question either.

I was attempting to create a few courses via the GUI "SIS Import."  My courses.csv file had the structure shown below.

I clicked on Choose File and selected the above file.  Chose "Instructure formatted CSV..." for the file format and clicked on the Process Data button.  The process started, and almost immediately failed, giving an error like that shown below:

"No short_name given for course," I said to myself, "Yes, it's right there!  There's a short_name for each of the courses!"

*By the way, the blurred out short names were each valid.  I tried again, and failed again.

I looked at the "courses.csv" format online, and saw nothing wrong.  I even downloaded the example courses.csv file and compared it to my courses file.  The example file ran without a problem, but my file continued to fail.

Finally, I am moving my cursor between field names in my courses.csv file, and my eye catches a slight difference.  The "short_name" field actually had a space in front of it, so it was " short_name".  I removed the space in front of this field, and saw there were a couple of other column IDs that had leading spaces and removed those spaces.  I re-saved the file.

I ran the SIS Import which now completed successfully;-)

[Robbie_Grant]

 @bgibson ​,

Yep, you have run into the infamous "space" issue in the CSV file imports.  We manage several programs that are outside of our SIS integration, which means we have to manually load CSV files.  I typically open the file in TextEdit just to check for this space issue.  It is very apparent when looking at the CSV file in a plain text editor.

Robbie

[fosterl]

Thanks for mentioning this. Once in a great while, we get this error on our single course files, which are automatically generated. Next time I see this, I'll know to take a look and see if there's a space, then I can investigate how this happens.

[bgibson]

Another "gremlin," which has occurred a few times, was when we have been importing course content, from a Blackboard course archive.  Most of the content gets imported, but the error message says the import "failed".  Support focused the cause of the failure as resulting because a few files included in the zipped archive exceed the maximum characters.  I think the maximum allowed was 255 characters.    Seems these few files picked up an extra "space" at the end of their file name, putting them at 256 characters, and causing them not to be imported into the Canvas course.  Once these file names were truncated, the import completed successfully.  *No telling why the extra spaces were added.