We are attempting to implement a software that uses many data points to help improve student retention, one of these data points is attendance. We are currently using the RollCall Attendance tool to enter and get reports on this data. We are able to run the reports to generate the needed info using the built-in utility. The problem is that we need to automate this process to ensure that we update the retention software as often as possible (once per day at least). This is difficult because of the process of generating that report

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
7. Open the email and navigate to the included url
8. Download the file form the given url

Steps 1-5 are simple enough to automate using headless browser, but steps 6-8 are more difficult to do in a secure manner. One option is to create a rule that runs on the emails arrival, but this has security concerns about look-a-like emails. Once we have either the url or the report file itself we can process it using our automation application, but getting to this point is where I have trouble.

I cannot find any API that Canvas has for dealing with any of this so any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Austin Gray

Database Report Writer | Programmer

Manhattan Area Technical College