Course published attribute

[jpt0001]

I can't seem to find the attribute that defines whether a course has been published by the instructor. Can someone point me in the right direction?

[ccoan · Accepted solution]

Hello John,

The courses don't necessarily have a published attribute as assignments, and such do. Instead they have a workflow state. The workflow state for a course that is published is "available", this is even true if a course is set to "Soft Conclude", or end with term dates. If the course is published, and not hard concluded the workflow state is "available", The other workflow states are:

'completed': The Course has been hard concluded

'deleted': The course has been deleted

'claimed': The course has been undeleted, and is not published

'created': The course has been created, but not published.

[hong_chau]

Thanks for clarifying -- is it possible to update the Portal Schema docs to include this information? It is not clear from the workflow_state documentation under the course_dim.

Related, does a course have to be deleted and then undeleted first, but unpublished to have the "claimed" state?

Or, does it simply mean the course has never been deleted and not published?

[ccoan]

Hey Hong,

As for adding documentation to the portal. I'm not the best person to ask on that. However I'll talk to Chris Ward, and have him loop in here to answer the question when he gets the chance.

As for your second question, a course has to be deleted, and then recreated through sis/api/admin ui to achieve a claimed status. If a course has never been deleted, and isn't published it should have a 'created' status.

[cward]

We'll add this additional info to the schema docs!

[brenden_goetz]

Did this get added? I don't see it in the schema docs. We had the same question. Happy to have found the answer here, but would love to see it in the course_dim section (or others as needed) of the schema docs too. Thanks!

[cward]

It did not, thanks for reminding me. I'll get a ticket in the queue for it today, should go out with the next release.

[milesl]

Hi, I'm looking at the docs here: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/courses.html

and it doesn't look like the "claimed" state has been documented yet.

Our devs ran into it today, and it took them some time to find this thread.

[millerjm]

 @milesl ‌, I put in a ticket with Instructure, which they closed, and I had my CSM re-open and escalate it. 

The docs team is "considering" whether they should put it on the api page and they don't seem to understand the reasoning for it.  I sent them some additional rationale.  There isn't a JIRA but here is my ticket number with Canvas Support if you'd like to reference it.  04266307

[a1222252]

Hi Joni,

This is documented as described in 2016 on the documentation tab of the Canvas Data Portal page of the application, and also in the schema.json that comes with a data download. This happened way back in schema version 1.17.0. Seems odd that the api documentation is not consistent.

Regards,

Stuart.

[millerjm]

Thanks - I realize it's on the Canvas Data Docs.  However, it's not properly documented on the API side.  That's what I've asked to have updated.