Get all Course's IDs?

[samson_chung]

Hey all,

I was looking at writing a program that would publish all my courses for me and I came upon several solutions. They all seems to go back to this one call.

Courses - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation 

The problem is that it seems the id of the course is needed to make this call, an id generated by Canvas' SIS Learning Environment where I don't (yet) have any idea how to read the ID used for selective courses.

My workaround is to use the sis_course_id: tag as suggested here.

Object IDs, SIS IDs, and special IDs - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation 

But is there a call you guys know that can retrieve all the courses' IDs from the system so we can run a system wide review? For example, courses that were created via the GUI... which wouldn't be tracked or predicted via external data sources?

Thanks in advance,

Sc.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @samson_chung ,

I use the provisioning report to get the course ids for all of the courses in specific terms.  I can then combine these csv files into one file to list all of them.  The provisioning report is found under Settings > Reports tab.

Robbie

[samson_chung]

Thank you, do you know if there's an API to obtain this report?

I was hoping of automating this and recording that data into the a DB somewhere to keep track of things...

Thanks,

Sc.

[James · Accepted solution]

 @samson_chung  

Don't download the report if you want to get the list through the API. Yes, you can generate the report through the API, but it will be easier to fetch the list of IDs directly.

Use the List active courses in an account endpoint of the Accounts API. You will need to handle pagination because you'll have more courses than can be returned in a single call.

[samson_chung]

Thanks!! I take it the Account ID is the 'Sub Account' id or something.. which most new Canvas Installations will be 1 or 2.....

Right?

[James]

I would not say that. It can be the root account or a sub-account. Perhaps if you're self-hosting it may be 1 or 2, but we're hosted by Instructure since 2012 and our account ID is almost 100,000.

You can use "self" as the account ID if you don't know the number.

It sounds like you may benefit from an introduction to the API outside of the official documentation. I would recommend https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-14390-canvas-apis-getting-started-the-practical-ins-and-out... for a comprehensive introduction and How do we *USE* API?  for links to other resources.

[samson_chung]

Thank you!! I will read up on that document