Calendar API: How to retrieve course events between specific dates?

[agschmid]

I've been doing a lot of testing with the calendar api and am stuck on how to retrieve events for a course between specific dates. I'm thinking there may be a bug.

I created a bunch of events (using the API) between 9/5/2019 and 10/17/2019. Looking at https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/calendar_events.html#method.calendar_events_api.index, I am only able to retrieve events if I used "all_events": true:

Call: GET /api/v1/calendar_events

The following returns nothing:
{
"context_codes": ["course_12345"],
"start_at": "2019-09-03",
"end_at": "2019-10-05"
}

This returns all the events posted for the course:
{
"context_codes": ["course_12345"],
"all_events": true
}

Do I have an error in the first JSON body or is this a bug?

[pklove]

Have you tried using the full ISO8601 date format:  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ

[agschmid]

Yes, same results...empty array. I'm leaning towards this being a bug. There are plenty of events between the dates and this doesn't make sense to me unless I'm missing something. I even tried adding the type in (event), even though it defaults to that, but still nothing.

[jsavage2]

I’m not sure what programming language/IDE you’re using to to make the calls, but is it possible the double-quoted dates are being parsed and passed as the wrong data type?

Do you get the same results with cURL and/or your language’s low-level HTTP library as you do with the JSON parser?

Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>

[agschmid]

I'm using Insomnia. Leaving the double-quotes off the dates returns an error. I also used double-quotes when creating all the events and they were all created correctly. The start date for the events was 9/5 and this morning I am getting results and am fairly certain now that there is a bug. Even though I have start_at and end_at, I'm only getting results for today, so the dates are being totally ignored.

From Calendar Events - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation :

GET /api/v1/calendar_events

start_date: Only return events since the start_date (inclusive). Defaults to today. The value should be formatted as: yyyy-mm-dd or ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ.

I will create a ticket and see what comes of that.

[jsavage2]

Yeah, that definitely looks like a bug.

It seems to be limited to user calendars. Something like GET /api/v1/calendar_events?context_codes[]=course_1635&start_date=2019-02-20T17:33:11Z&end-date=2019-12-31T23:59:59Z for a course calendar seems to work as expected.

The same bug also seems to hit the alternative endpoint for user calendars. GET /api/v1/users/:user_id/calendar_events?start_date=2019-02-20T17:33:11Z&end-date=2019-12-31T23:59:59Z doesn’t seem to work, either.

[agschmid]

I have to say I feel like an idiot now...I had start_at and end_at, (which are used when creating the events), when I should have had start_date and end_date when pulling the events. This is working as expected when pulling course events.

[James]

I think I've made that exact mistake before with this API call. It's unlike the others and when something works 99 times out of 100, we tend to just assume it will work the 100th time without reading the fine print.