[SIS] Running SIS Import and looking for duplicates

[bturner5]

Problem statement:

When running a SIS Import, the SIS ID is used as assuming that where it is coming from is a unique ID that would always reference the same user in Canvas. So it assumes that whatever SIS ID is provided would be the one that would be updated or created in Canvas if not current user exists with that ID. There isn't currently a way to check if a user already exists with that ID and let you know if someone already exists before proceeding.

Proposed solution:

Would like there to be an option available to only allow creating new items from a SIS Import and not touch any existing data and/or give a message if we want to continue with the import. I manually import using files in the SIS Gui every month and obviously try to avoid duplicate SIS IDs. The last import had duplicate SIS IDs (from 2 years ago) and the new accounts weren't created and the old account added an email address. I had no idea this happened until users weren't able to get into the system. The first call with Canvas helped me to correct this but didn't know how it happened. After I had 3 students unable to get in, after much looking around I discovered what happened and had a lot of cleaning up, creating new accounts, etc. Canvas should be able to help me know this ahead of the import so that it could be corrected.

User role(s):

admin

[jpoulos]

Thanks for submitting this idea! We currently provide a SIS export report that will allow you to see all of the existing data in the system. I believe this should allow you to check for duplicates prior to running your import. You may also want to consider diffing mode, which will only touch entries in your import that have actually changed. For example, if 2/1000 rows are modified in some way, and 5/1000 are net new, you'd just see 2 updates and 5 net new. The remaining rows would be untouched.

Since I believe there are already multiple pathways for resolution on this, I am setting the status for this to "Will Not Consider".

If you don't think this will solve the problem at hand, please feel free to add clarity to what additional value this request would be adding and we can reconsider changing the status back to open.