[ARCHIVED] Nested sub-accounts via Ellucian ILP

[ThatChrisMyers]

We're going through an LMS RFP and are putting Canvas through its paces. We've currently got Ellucian ILP configured and things seem to be working ok so far. We're trying to figure out how to get nested sub-accounts to work for ILP-created course sections.

As an STP institution, we have six universities sharing the same SIS and LMS environment. As each institution is independent of each other, we have hierarchies set up in our existing LMS so that folks have the correct security, course sections are located in the correct subfolders ("sub accounts"), branding is automatically applied correctly, etc.

SDBOR
|
|--> SDSU
|         |-->Marketing
|                   |-->Section A
|                   |-->Section B
|         |-->Accounting
|                   |-->Section C
|                   |-->Section D
|--> USD
|         |-->Marketing
|                   |-->Section E
|                   |-->Section F
|         |-->Accounting
|                   |-->Section G
|                   |-->Section H
(etc)

We're trying to figure out how to make this work in Canvas via ILP. We're hitting roadblocks at this point though -

We can use the
[<$.site.title>]
format with the "Use Department to create new sub-account" option to get the sections to go one level deep (eg. to the SDSU level above) but not to get the nested sublevel/sub-account piece to work.

If we try to use the "Use Category in the Advanced Settings section to map to existing sub-account" option, the section creation fails with
"message": "The specified resource does not exist."
regardless of whether the sub-account already exists.

Is there any way to get this to work correctly?

[tyema]

Did you ever get an answer to this?

[Justin_Reynolds]

I would like to know how to set this up correctly as well.

[bettermjcohen]

Hey everyone!

I was working on this, too, and Ellucian and I were stumped. I had a stroke of brilliance (mostly luck) and thought about the manual accounts.csv import files.

My fix was that I needed to do a manual import of the accounts.csv file and set the ID for each of the sub-accounts before syncing any courses. Once I did that, it worked.

account_id	parent_account_id	name	status
ESL		ESL	active

It's a bit of manual work on my end to set it up, because I need to know all the account_ids to import before syncing, but once set up, it synced perfectly!

I had to work with Ellucian to figure out the custom category format of what data in Ellucian Colleague (through ILP) that we wanted to organize by, but one we got that piece working, then I just needed to set the account_ids to match the category and voila!

We set our custom course category format to [<$.secLocalGovtCodes>] because we wanted to organize by the Local IDs field on the SECT form in Colleague.

Data : {
  "id": "(hidden)",
  "label": "(hidden)",
  "title": "(hidden)",
  "parent": "(hidden)",
  "credits": 1,
  "endDate": "(hidden)",
  "subject": "(hidden)",
  "category": "ESL",
  "location": "Trevecca Nazarene University",
  "startDate": "(hidden)",
  "department": "(hidden)",
  "description": "(hidden)",
  "departmentId": "(hidden)",
  "academicPeriod": "(hidden)",
  "maxNumberOfStudents": 24
}

I apologize for the jumbled brain dump of a comment, but I hope this helps other people get this working for their own structure!