[ARCHIVED] SIS Import question

[tdelillo]

I have a question about SIS Imports. When our Banner person does a manual extract and push of data to Canvas (which he does once or twice a semester, for various reasons), I've noticed the SIS Import report almost always says "Accounts: 9". 

Example:

I've always assumed this is telling me what's being CREATED upon import. But we can't be creating 9 accounts every time we import a batch of courses. And technically we're not even updating 9 accounts, because we are still pushing all our courses to a single account (no sub-accounts). Can any Canvas Admins‌ or Canvas Developers‌ explain what might be going on here?

[robotcars]

EDIT: I kept rereading your post and finally remembered the details of imports. Specifically, the Last Batch report, doesn't exclude duplicates or just present new unique additions in those counts. It's a count of the rows you passed it in each SIS import file type... (based on instructure csv headers, for instance my enrollments are based on 4 files)

I don't import 100,000 new enrollments every day, I just run 4 files with 100,000± enrollments every day.

I also didn't import 4000 courses today. Most likely 99% of them are the same, maybe 1 or 2 new ones (this late in the year), or maybe some changes to the course name or status.

I did however, import ~148 unique/new users today, because the query that generates that file, explicitly looks for records created in the SIS ±1 day of execution. Then on Sunday I do a complete load of every record... which appends new records to Canvas or updates existing Canvas sis records not caught during the week.

And because I was confused about you only running it once or twice a semester... the following could still apply if someone finds themselves here later.

Accounts are referring to Sub Accounts, part of the organizational structure of your Canvas. This keeps your courses from landing in the root of your instance. I would double check that something like the following example is happening.

If exactly 9 accounts are created each term... it might be something like...9 subjects get 1 new account per term:

Mathematics

   Fall17

   Spr18 (1 of 9)

Science

   Fall17

   Spr18 (1 of 9)

Social Studies

   Fall17

   Spr18 (1 of 9)

Here's the API documentation for SIS imports, see accounts.csv

SIS Import Format Documentation - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation

[tdelillo]

That makes sense, and yet.... All of our courses are currently going to a single subaccount. And there are something like 16 other subaccounts that aren't currently in use. So I still can't figure where the "9" comes from. 

[robotcars]

Maybe he's statically loading accounts with accounts.csv, and never used them to place courses into them.

The best way would be to ask him for a copy of the accounts.csv and courses.csv files, and check where courses are going.

The hardest way would be to drill down through them from the Admin Menu > All Accounts > Sub Accounts (each one looking for courses)

And there's this... Admin Tray - Sub Account Menu, but this won't tell you how many courses are in each sub account.