last_activity_at within the Enrollments table - CD2

[JamesSorenson]

I'm seeing a lot of students that do not have a value within the Enrollments table in their "last_activity_at" attribute.  I resync'd my data this morning into Postgres and found a case where a student showed no activity, but had completed several assignments in a course.

I had been hoping to use the "last_activity_at" value to determine how recently students are logging in, without having to dig into the web_logs activity.

Is there an issue with the value in the enrollments table, or am I experience an odd latency issue that is beyond 36-48 hours?

[jhveem]

Just anecdotally, I've had issues with the date I expected in the last_activity_at field when using the API, to the point I stopped using it. However it's been a couple of years, so that may have been resolved.

However, to diagnose your problem, I would first check to see if the api results match your cd2 results. If you've used the api before, use your favorite method. For anyone reading this that is in a situation where they have admin rights and access to cd2 data, but hasn't used the API, I'll offer one way that doesn't require messing with API keys.

1. Open up chrome
2. Log into Cavnas.
3. Go to the user's course page (https://<your_institution>.instructure.com/courses/<course_id>/users/<user_id>
4. Open the chrome developer console (ctrl+ shift + i).
5. Run this script

let courseId = ENV.COURSE_ID; // if ENV doesn't have it, manually enter
let userId = ENV.USER_ID; // if ENV doesn't have it, manually enter
let enr = await $.get(`/api/v1/courses/${courseId}/enrollments?user_id=${userId}&state[]=active&state[]=invited&state[]=deleted&state[]=completed&state[]=inactive`);
console.log(enr);

 spot check if the field last_activity_at matches what you see in cd2.