Batch mode termId

[sutaria]

I am working on API call for batch mode. The Courses and Enrollments are term specific and it makes sense to specify the termId for those files in batch mode. But the Accounts are not term specific. What term should I specify for Accounts in order to use batch mode? Please suggest.

[MattHanes]

We send term specific things separately from things that are not term specific. So we send up accounts, courses, sections, users, cross-lists in one batch and then we send enrollments separately as a term-specific batch upload.

[sutaria]

@Matt - Thank you for your prompt response. A follow-up question - so what term do you specify when you send accounts, users in batch mode? My understanding is that you have to specify term in batch mode.

[MattHanes]

Batch mode only effects courses, sections, and enrollments. So it won't effect your accounts and users. I believe you have to actually send deleted records to get rid of users so you can't rely on batch mode to delete accounts and users. Edit: you can use diffing mode to automatically delete users.

I actually got confused about how we did things because I hadn't looked closely in a while.  Looking at them now, this is what we do:

1. Batch mode for accounts, users, courses, sections, cross-lists.
2. Batch mode for enrollments for the first few weeks of school while everyone is moving around a lot. Then I use diffing mode after that instead of batch. I think they have improved diffing mode a lot since our original implementation. I might be able to use that even in the beginning because I don't think "diffing_drop_status" was an option to pass originally. I could be wrong. I'm not a programmer so I barely understand this stuff. 
   
   

[MattHanes · Accepted solution]

Oh, I just read the documentation again for diffing mode and you can use diffing mode to delete users. So if your goal is automatically delete users that aren't in the next uploaded file, then use diffing mode instead of batch mode for sending the users.csv file. The documentation didn't specifically say anything about accounts in diffing mode but you don't really ever delete the accounts because it has the courses in them. It won't let you delete an account that has courses in it. I hope I'm helping and not just further confusing things lol.

[sutaria]

Thank you very much for your replies.....you are not confusing me further. This is very helpful.

[James]

I'm like you that we wrote ours a while ago. Back in 2012, I built diff mode for SIS imports in on my end so that I only sent the changes to Canvas.