Custom field to include the students account balance?

[Skot]

Has anyone created a custom field within Canvas that shows the students account balance?  I am thinking; adding a link from within the students account within Canvas that a student can click on and they can see what they owe for their classes.  I believe we can include that information in a column of the user.csv SIS feed file from Banner if we could just create and tie it to the LMS somehow.  

I hope that made sense.

Is this possible? Has anyone done anything like this before?

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @Skot ,

There isn't really an option to add a "custom field" in the user record in Canvas.  It might be possible to re-purpose one of the existing fields, like "integration_id", but most of those fields aren't really visible to the user.

If I were trying to give students a way to check their account balance, I think I would add a link in the global navigation menu to let them go out to Banner (or wherever) and check their account balance directly from the source, especially if you're using the same SSO for both systems so they don't need to log in again.  That way, they're checking their actual balance in "real time", rather than getting a value from whenever the user feed was generated.

[Skot]

Thanks! Yes, I was thinking of re-purposing an existing field if I went that route.  I read that adding anything to the global navigation runs the risk of breaking when Instructure pushes updates to Canvas.  I wonder how often such customization gets broken and would it be worth going down that rabbit hole?

[mzimmerman]

Hi @Skot 

Adding custom links is fairly straightforward, and not really that easy to break.  We've been using the Global Nav - Custom Links code from Robert Carroll ( https://github.com/robert-carroll/ccsd-canvas ) for many years and have never had a problem.

[Skot]

Awesome!  Thanks for that link, I'll look into that.