How does a parent stop observing a student?

[emily_beckman]

I have some parents that would like to stop observing or unlink their accounts to former students. How can they accomplish this task? They can easily add new students but they don't see any option for stop observing students that are no longer at the school either due to graduation or they have moved on to another school.

Is this something the user can do or is this something an admin user needs to do?

-Emily

[emily_beckman · Accepted solution]

Thanks for Katie Bishop from Support for getting back to me with the answer.

There is not a UI option that allows a parent to remove an observee, however this can be removed through API.  The API call that can be used can be found here: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/user_observees.html#method.user_observees.destroy

Remove an observee       UserObserveesController#destroy

DELETE /api/v1/users/:user_id/observees/:observee_id

Unregisters a user as being observed by the given user.

Example Request:

curl https://<canvas>/api/v1/users/<user_id>/observees/<observee_id>; \ 
-X DELETE \ 
-H 'Authorization: Bearer <token>'

[clong]

Just used this today! Much better than filing a help ticket. Thanks for sharing this! :smileygrin:

[jason_castaldo]

I have used GAM (Google Apps Manage) to update Google accounts, so I get the concept, but I'm not sure where to enter the command or what to use with Canvas. Are there instructions as to how to make the API calls? What do you use to make the call?

[clong]

You can do this right in a Terminal window you just need to create an API token so you have the right permissions to do this. See How do I obtain an API access token for an account?

[jason_castaldo]

Ok. So I created my token by going to Settings and New Access Token

I downloaded Curl and then opened it in a command window

I tried various combinations of the commands listed above, to no avail.

Am I way off? Any suggestions?

[jason_castaldo]

I think I got it...

C:\curl-7.47.0-win64-mingw\bin>curl -H "Authorization: Bearer XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" "https://xxxxxxxxxx.instructure.com/api/v1/users/##/observees/####" -X DELETE

If using Windows, you must use double quotes, rather than single, as given in the original example.

[jason_castaldo]

The first two lines are the command. The third line is the response after pressing enter.

[clong]

Good to know Jason

Glad you were able to get this going. It certainly will open the door to other possibilities.

[yorkc1]

I, like one of the above, have used GAM frequently, had no issues setting it up in Terminal, but this seems to have no documentation.  I can obviously generate an access token, but what in the world is to be done with it after the fact??  Please can someone help?  I only need to remove some users from an observer account.  Is there really no way to do this through the GUI yet in 2019??