Getting Started with APIs

[cgaudreau]

Canvas Developer community members,

Where might someone interested in utilizing APIs go to get started? I am looking to pull down, among other things, User Agent data without relying on other members of the institution to fit in the calls to their schedule.

I do not have much experience with developer tools and keys, and any help would be greatly appreciated!

[bneporadny]

Hi cgaudreau,

You can find all the api‌'s available for you to use here  #Canvas LMS REST API Documentation.

Once you have a chance to review the API's you may want to head over to the Canvas live api‌ page where you can test out making the calls to all the API's and review the data you would receive back. Note replace where it says Canvas in the URL with your institutions. You can also point this to  your test and beta environment so that you don't do any harm to your live production environment while testing out your api calls.

You can also try using the Postman app as it a great tool to use when first experimenting with RESTful API's Postman | Supercharge your API workflow 

You can also check out this great post in the community about using Postman: API Testing: Postman

If you have specific questions let us know and we will all be glad to help you in the https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/canvas-developers‌ group.

Brian

[cgaudreau]

 @bneporadny ‌, thank you for all of this information! I'm going to block off some time this week to dive into the resources you provided. After spending the last few days knee-deep in course evaluation software (ugh), I'm excited to get into some new data.

[bneporadny]

Hi cgaudreau,

Just found another resource that you might find helpful with getting started using Canvas api's Canvas APIs: Getting started, the practical ins and outs, gotchas, tips, and tricks.

[ColinMurtaugh]

Hi Christopher --

In addition to the good resources above, I'll also mention that if you're interested in getting user agent data you may need to use Canvas Data. Canvas Data is essentially a data-warehouse view of the data used by your Canvas instance; your CSM will need to enable it for your instance if it's not already turned on, and your local Canvas admin will need to grant you access.  Among the many data tables available is the "requests" table which essentially contains webserver log data, including the user agent string for each request. 

Downloading and using data from Canvas Data can be a little bit tricky (especially the requests table, since it's so large); if you do end up going down that path, you might want to check out the Data and Analytics Group here in the Canvas Community.

--Colin

[cgaudreau]

Thank you, 50581462‌. Turns out, this morning the local data admin granted me access to the data portal. I'll be checking back in on this and the https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/big-data?sr=search&searchId=8decfc67-3b87-451c-b1b2-508818ffb...‌ group for sure.

[cgaudreau]

I have found that, along with all the resources provided, this course from edX has been incredibly helpful in building my somewhat lacking foundational mathematic skills: https://www.edx.org/course/data-science-r-basics. That and a visit from a data science faculty member showing me some (new to me) tricks in Excel.

Who knew pivot tables were so useful? :smileyconfused:

[jperkins]

cgaudreau‌ I'm not sure if you are still interested or not, but I just released a self-paced course on using Ruby & the Canvas API's that you could sign up for. More details here, or you can sign up directly here.

[cgaudreau]

 @jperkins ‌, this looks wonderful! I am in a deluge of data at the moment, and might not be able to get through the entire course in time. Might you offer it again after it ends in May? Love the concept, and thanks for the invite!

[jperkins]

I understand the lack of time issue. After I receive feedback from this time around, I'll probably tweak the course and offer it as a non-facilitated course with no end dates. 

[stuart_ryan]

 @jperkins  that looks like an awesome course! I would be very curious to get a link to the final version (non-facilitated) so that I could add it in the Canvas APIs: Getting started, the practical ins and outs, gotchas, tips, and tricks‌ guide.

[jperkins]

Absolutely!