Reports vs data: unpublished courses

[james_umphres1]

When I pull a canvas provisioning report I see a status column that lists courses as unpublished or published. Makes perfect sense.

At my school we use oracle and have a reporting dashboard provided by OIT. When I search for unpublished courses I have to look at Course Workflow State as completed, claimed, created, or deleted. OK, fine. Courses with the state of Created or Claimed should be unpublished. But the numbers don't match up with what I see on the provisioning report.

Does canvas data look at different tables than the reporting page in the UI?

I'm trying to obtain a list of unpublished classes with 5 or fewer students, so I need the data reporting--provisioning won't cut it. I can think of ways around this but I don't trust what's coming from canvas data. It seems wrong and esoteric. Anyone else had this complaint?

Thanks

[robotcars]

Looks like you're missing 'available', which are published courses. The rest are different states of unpublished.

Course_dim - Canvas Data Portal 

Workflow status indicating the current state of the course, valid values are: completed (course has been hard concluded), created (course has been created, but not published), deleted (course has been deleted), available (course is published, and not hard concluded), claimed (course has been undeleted, and is not published).

[james_umphres1]

Yeah, i'm more curious about where canvas reports (provisioning, etc) get their info as opposed to where the reporting interface for our database gets it's info.

[robotcars]

Provisioning refers to SIS Imports, those values should match SIS Import Format Documentation - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation 

[james_umphres1]

Do you have any insight on why active/deleted in the SIS file changes to completed/created/deleted/available/claimed etc in the data portal?

[robotcars]

It's a difference between SIS import status and the courses's workflow_state, different values with different meaning and purpose.

Provisioning reflects the status likely to be created/sent by the SIS system. The SIS system doesn't know Canvas internal courses states. So, when provisioning a record is either going to be initially set to active (which does not mean published), or later deleted/completed. *I am not sure how the provisioning report rolls a state 'unpublished', it's probably based on some logic to produce that based on the course state and settings.

The internal workflow_state of courses in Canvas (and Canvas Data) reflects the individual state that a course can take. While a course is active, is doesn't have to be published. Provisioning creates an active course, but the workflow_state is 'created', not published.

The course still has to be published from the UI or using the API.

You cannot publish a course from the SIS Imports... probably/mostly because SIS Imports only create an empty course shell, there is no content.

*I'm having a hard time finding documentation to support some of this, and I've asked around, but this seems like the only explanation. Love for someone to provide more details or documentation.

[robotcars]

Looks like course.workflow_state is substituted when creating the provisioning report.

L269 canvas-lms/sis_exporter.rb at a664cdb0b26bf9d4473c0204dba38fc73a34ece7 · instructure/canvas-lms...

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L293 canvas-lms/sis_exporter.rb at a664cdb0b26bf9d4473c0204dba38fc73a34ece7 · instructure/canvas-lms...