Roll Call Attendance

[solomong]

So, what's the latest on an API for Roll Call? The web isn't looking too promising...😂

Thanks,
Jerry

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @solomong,

I don't believe the Attendance/Roll Call tool has an API available.  It's actually an external tool integrated into Canvas, which means and if an API were ever developed for the tool, it would probably be a standalone thing and not directly connected to Canvas.  The  Solved: Attendance Report Using API - Instructure Community discussion has some alternate suggestions that may work for you, depending on what exactly you're trying to do.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @solomong,

I don't believe the Attendance/Roll Call tool has an API available.  It's actually an external tool integrated into Canvas, which means and if an API were ever developed for the tool, it would probably be a standalone thing and not directly connected to Canvas.  The  Solved: Attendance Report Using API - Instructure Community discussion has some alternate suggestions that may work for you, depending on what exactly you're trying to do.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[solomong]

Hi Chris,

Yep - that's what I was expecting. We have a home-brewed app that uses the roll call attendance report to create some summaries and warning emails for students. It would be nice to automate the attendance report downloads instead of having to do it daily via human interaction. But not a show stopper. Thanks for the response.

Jerry

[Canvas007]

Another improvement to the Attendance tool is to incorporate a QR code feature to enable students to self-check in. It seems the biggest challenge is the wasted time for faculty to mark students manually. 

[wade1]

 I would suggest that the present developer/provider add a note section for each student.  It would be great to have one place to put notes on the days activity with the student.

How do I contact the developer?

Thanks

Mike

[James · Accepted solution]

@wade1 

If I remember my history correctly, RollCall Attendance was written by Instructure for a client and then released for others to use. But it was never intended to be a full-featured attendance tool. They maintain it but don't look to improve it. It has a lot of inflexibility that other parts of Canvas don't such as the admonition to never delete, rename, or unpublish the assignment.

There is some development happening in Instructrure's rollcall-attendance GitHub repository but most of it involves updating libraries to newer versions and not adding new functionality.

There was a push several years ago for people to write alternatives. Kansas State University developed their attendance tool in 2017 and switched over to using it. I'm not sure if this is the same version mentioned, but they have an lti-attendance repository.

Other third party solutions, such as aPlus+ attendance are available for a fee. As a paid service, I would expect them to be more receptive to suggestions than Instructure is about RollCall Attendance.

I don't use any of the three attendance platforms I mentioned so do not take them as recommendations. I used RollCall attendance for a week or two back in 2012 or 2013 and have never gone back. I have automated pulling reports out of RollCall for an early-alert system, but don't use RollCall myself anymore.

[solomong]

Hey James,

Thanks for the reply. Actually, what I was hoping to use an API for is pulling RollCall reports without having to login and fetch them. What direction did you go for that - the Canvas API?

Jerry

[James]

Jerry ( @solomong )

Canvas doesn't have a public API for RollCall Attendance. They might use something internally, but that's not exposed to us. I looked at the routes.rb file in the source code and there's nothing there about an api. Searching for api within the GitHub repository doesn't return anything interesting, either.

What I can see from the admin side is that you complete a web form that triggers the generation of the report.

How I obtained the information was to launch a sessionless LTI using the Canvas API. Then I sent a form that mimicked the form that Canvas would send if you went to the Admin page and filled it out. I provided an email account for a service account so it didn't go to my email. When mail shows up for that user, the message is pipe through a script that parses it and extracts the data needed to download the report. It wrote that to a database so that it could finish quickly and not hang up the mail delivery. I then had a cron job that ran every so often to look for undownloaded reports and fetch them, parse them, and add them to a local database for further processing.

[solomong]

Ugh - I think I'll just keep having the admin assistant download them! 😂 Thanks for the info. We've got an app that "extends" RollCall in order to send warning emails to students and parents. It's highly customized for one area of the school. We really need a full blown app that works for the entire institution. Hopefully we're working towards that and can one day soon lay RollCall to rest!

Thanks again,
Jerry

[hdelrio]

@James , would you be able to provide your scripts? I am interested in exactly doing what you are describing here. I was not aware of the session less LTI, and I am not sure how long will it take me to grasp all what is needed to implement what you are suggesting. 

Heberto

[James]

@hdelrio 

I cannot provide those scripts.

We had a couple of servers crash without backups and the version I found is really old (from 2018). I had made updates and revisions and even put them under revision control, but the SVN was one of the servers that died.

I've not been as active in the Community recently because I've been trying to recreate all of our backend Canvas code that was lost in February 2024. I also lost major portions of 30+ years of teaching content so I've been trying to recreate some of that as well.

When our head IT guy said I didn't need to recreate the script that synchronized Canvas with our early alert system, I was ecstatic. But the code that extracted the rollcall attendance was part of that software.