SIS "Process as UI changes" as a Manual enrollment entry

[matt6]

We are looking for means in situations where we have to process large batch enrollments by means of SIS while retaining the teachers ability to delete the users from their courses should they wish.  The use case is very large courses that are either non-academic in nature or not based on our Banner data and enrollments post batch creation are controlled by the teacher.

The override for UI changes make it seem as though is "Process as UI changes" is selected these enrollments would be treated as if they were done via the UI.  However the created by SIS flag regardless of override settings seems to be always true and no matter what we check no SIS enrollment can be removed from the teacher.   Granted this could be done via the API but an idea would to have a checkbox toggle in the SIS feature that truly allows batch data to be inserted and not be flagged SIS create as the "Process as UI Changes" hints at.

Thank you.

[mzimmerman]

Hi Matthew,

I may be mistaken, but my understanding of the "Override UI Changes" option was primarily to make the changes "sticky" and allow the SIS feed to overwrite changes made through the GUI (as well as prevent them from being overwritten by subsequent SIS feeds, as if they had been entered via the GUI).  That's from the "Stickiness" section in SIS Import Format Documentation - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation 

The "Created by SIS" flag seems to be unavoidable when records have been created via SIS feed.  I even tried sticking a "created_by_sis" field set to FALSE in the feed and it was ignored...

Mike

[matt6 · Accepted solution]

I've tried that too and no luck.  I started writing batch flat file tool that uses the API which is fine and will work, it's just that having an override checkbox that does indeed treat it was a UI manual change and doesn't toggle the SIS created flag to true would be a better built in option.

[c_carrillo1]

The purpose of "Process as UI changes" should be to process the feed file as a batch of manual (UI-created) enrollments.  

The fact that Canvas is ignoring this option and setting the created_by_sis flag to true is a bug.  We need to notify Instructure of this problem.

[DanL]

Totally agree with this.

Has anyone opened any cases to this effect?  I'd like to reference them in a case I'll open too.

[c_carrillo1]

Our case number for this issue was 08899531.  However we were essentially told that the process was functioning as designed and the created_by_sis flag is always set to true for uploaded feed files, even if the "Process as UI changes" option is checked.