Purge SIS ID so it can be used again

[mamontgomery]

We have a student who was accidentally assigned a new ID in our SIS so when our Canvas SIS import ran that evening it assigned the student the new incorrect ID but all their enrollments are still referencing the former correct ID. We got the ID corrected in the SIS but not in Canvas.

I have tried to upload a csv with the correct former SIS ID but it says that ID is already in use. Although no active user has that ID. I also tried to manually update the login on the user account page but it won't take the former ID that way either.

Is there a way to purge the incorrect SIS ID from Canvas so it won't think it is currently in use?

Thanks,

Marc

[tross]

We have had this happen once and we manually changed the SIS ID in the UI to something that would never be a student SIS ID.  Our integration is set though so that it doesn't override changes we make in the UI.

[mamontgomery]

Yes, ours is also set to maintain UI changes above automated updates. I could change it the SIS ID to something random, but we need it back to the former SIS ID to pick up future enrollments. So that won't help resolve this issue but it's a good thought. Thanks for the suggestion.

[ahess4]

What *MAY* have happened is that the user had a new account created with the 'incorrect' SIS ID, and the existing account with the old SIS ID is deleted.

You can try looking for the deleted account, reactivate and reconcile the accounts.

Also, try changing the SIS ID via GUI to the old 'correct' ID and see if you get an error.

Finally, are you using integration ids? If so, that could be causing problems...

Thanks,

Anthony

[ahess4]

Sorry, re-read your message. You did try changing it via GUI and it didn't work... Then most likely deleted user account with existing SIS ID. Need to reactivate that account, and reconcile the both accounts for this user.

[ahess4 · Accepted solution]

Try this:

Pull the pseudonym_dim from Canvas Data and look for the SIS user id (or run a provisioning report for users, being sure to include deleted objects). If found, use the data for that record to reactivate the user via user create API call - /v1/accounts/{account_id}/users - using the canvas id and the sis user id from the record, being sure to set enable_sis_reactivation = true.

If you are not familiar with API calls, you can use the live API tool, pretty straight forward: https://[hostname]/doc/api/live#!/

Then you can reconcile the accounts as they will both be active.

[mamontgomery]

That worked perfectly! Thank you so much Anthony. I had no idea that live API tool existed.