Using the reports API

[wlehnertz]

Any admins use the APIs to pull reports?

Background: Trying to automate reports, so we can import certain data into our CRM.

Scripting Language: Python

Report: Zero activity report

I'm trying to automate a few report, but this one is specifically giving me problems right now. I only want a report for the past week. Currently, I receive the All Terms. I pass in the URL parameters below:

params['start_at'] = '2016-05-10T17:00:00Z'
params['enrollment_term_id'] = '13'

I know the term id is correct, as I have pulled it from a previous report I ran. My guess is the date format is wrong, or there's a bug in the API. I pulled the date format from the API docs. I wish the docs included more info about the reports.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Stef_retired]

 @wlehnertz ​, I don't have an answer to your question, but I wanted to let you know that I've shared it with the Canvas Admins​ and Canvas Developers​ groups to attract those users likely to have experience with using the API to pull reports.

[tdelillo]

I was just wondering about this yesterday - proper formatting of the date/time. There appears to be several variations of the ISO 8601 format, and I don't know how forgiving the API is, I just know I couldn't make it work.

[James]

I've got class in a few minutes so I won't be able to do more than try to remember what I've encountered (and I don't use this endpoint, but I once looked into it).

I think you're passing the wrong information. It needs a query parameter called "parameters" and that field is a string, not an object. I think you need to stringify the parameters JSON object.

Account Reports - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation

[wlehnertz · Accepted solution]

Thanks James! You were in the right direction. I made some attempts which failed. I discovered this script and used it as an example. My final parameters dictionary looks like this:

reportParams = {"parameters[start_at]": startDate, "parameters[enrollment_term_id]": enrollment_term_id}

As for the date and time. I used pythons datetime library. We only need a week's worth of data, so I subtracted 7 days from the current date. Below is what that looks like:

startDate = datetime.datetime.now() - datetime.timedelta(days=7)

startDate = str(startDate.isoformat())