Automating the collection of attendance data

[daniela_aguado]

Hi Canvas Developers!

Is there a way to automate the collection of attendance data in the native attendance Roll Call tool in Canvas?

In other words not having to go through these steps:

1. Log into Canvas as an admin
2. Select the "Admin" tab
3. Select the account you want to generate the report for
4. Navigate to the Attendance tab
5. Enter the date range, and an email address to send the report to, etc
6. Wait for the email

Is there a way to automate the above steps?

Thanks!

Daniela

[James · Accepted solution]

 @daniela_aguado  

Yes, with a lot of programming.

We do it by creating a sessionless launch of the RollCall LTI tool, fill out the form that it delivers three times. We decided to give faculty 3 weeks to enter or change their data and after that, it doesn't get reflected on our local copy. Since you can only request up to a week at a time, we had to submit three requests. RollCall takes about 30 minutes to process the three requests.

Then I added a milter to our mail transport agent to listen for emails coming from RollCall and extracts the download information from it. 

Another process runs that checks for downloads that still need to happen. It downloads any pending requests and stores the data to a local database.

Others probably have their own way of doing it. There have been a couple of feature requests to expose the data through the API and various questions about it over the years. Here is one of those threads: https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/8632 

[daniela_aguado]

Very helpful, thank you for sharing your process. Will need to work with a Developer on this.