Customers need the ability to leverage APIs that facilitate the synchronization of data between Anthology Student and a Learning Management System (LMS). This topic addresses the interfaces and procedures needed for the following APIs:
| Category | API |
|---|---|
| Attendance / Grade APIs |
|
| Extract Term / CourseSection Schedule Registration APIs |
|
| Extract Student Course Registration APIs |
|
| Extract Registration Actions APIs |
|
Attendance/Grade APIs
Post Attendance – Posting detailed attendance for a student registered into a specific course section. The main driver behind the development of this API is to facilitate integration with a 3rd party LMS. One of the touch points within this integration will be the exporting of attendance data from the LMS into Anthology Student.
Post Final Grades – Posting a final grade for a course section a student has completed.
Update Final Grades – Updating the student’s final grade for a course section for which final grade was posted earlier.
Extract Term/Course Section Schedule Registration APIs
Get Term/Course Section Schedules – Extract scheduled classes for a term out of Anthology Student. The LMS imports this information to create the course section master records within the LMS database. These master records are a prerequisite to students being registered into course sections. The information extracted from Anthology Student includes course code, description, instructor, term code, and an Id that uniquely identifies the course section within Anthology Student. The LMS stores this Id for the purpose of easily communicating the course section to Anthology Student when subsequent exports of attendance and grade data are done from the LMS.
Acknowledge Term/Course Section Schedules – This API marks the records sent so that they are not exported multiple times.
Extract Student Course Registration APIs
Get Student Course Registrations (To be deprecated in a future release) – Extract student course registration data for a term out of Anthology Student. The LMS imports this information to create the association between students and the courses they are registered in within the LMS. The information extracted from Anthology Student includes student identifier, course code, term, and the unique identifier for the course section the student is registered into. This unique identifier references the Id exported from Anthology Student in the previous step.
Note: This API will be deprecated in a future release and replaced by the WCF GetRegistrationActions API.
Acknowledge Student Course Registrations (To be deprecated in a future release) – This API will mark the records sent so they are not exported multiple times. It should be used in conjunction with the Get Student Course Registrations API.
Note: This API will be deprecated in a future release and replaced by the WCF AcknowledgeRegistrationActions API.
Extract Registration Actions APIs
These APIs are intended as a replacement for the Extract Student Course Registration APIs described above. The Extract Student Course Registration APIs facilitate the synchronization of student course registration data between Anthology Student and the LMS. Prior to this enhancement, these processes had limited functionality. With this enhancement, the Extract API (GetRegistrationActions) and the Acknowledgement API (AcknowledgeRegistrationActions) have been created to support the extended Anthology Student/LMS functionality.
Before this enhancement, only limited actions got extracted with the LMS APIs because a subsequent update to the record may have overwritten the previous registration action data. These issues have been resolved in the new APIs. They also return records for registration actions such as LOA and course Deletes, which was not supported by the older APIs.
Note: Real time extraction using the Extract Student Course Registrations APIs is facilitated via the LMS Notification Windows Service. This service does not currently support these new APIs.
Get Registration Actions – This API is re-engineered from the Get Student Course Registrations API. All the functionality in the Get Student Course Registrations API is supported by this API. In addition, it has additional search options in input messages such as extract by array of course sections. It supports limiting the output message record size. Issues in the old API, such as missing registration records, are fixed in this API. The underlying implementation of this API is independent of the old API and invoking one of these APIs will not impact results of the other API.
Pagination in the Get Registration Action API
To avoid performance degradation when a large volume of registration actions is pending for extract, configurable throttles have been placed on the number of records that can be returned by this API.
The first limit is at SQL level and is implemented via the SyRegistry table Regkey “AdGetRegActionRecordLimit”. By default, this is set to 500. This value can only be overridden via SQL.
More flexibility in setting this limit is provided via the “RecordLimit” field in the input message.
The lower of the two settings above will be set as the record limit. If any of the above values is 0, the non-zero value will be used. If both are 0, no limit will be placed on the number of records returned.
If a limit was set and additional records are pending to be extracted, the “NextFromActivityId” field in output message will have a value greater than 0 to indicate that additional records exist for extract.
Acknowledge Registration Actions – This API is re-engineered from the Acknowledge Student Course Registrations API. This API will mark the records sent so they are not exported multiple times. It should be used in conjunction with the Get Registration Actions API.
The underlying implementation of this API is independent of the Acknowledge Student Course Registrations API and invoking one of these APIs will not impact results of the other API.
Records can be marked for retransmit by setting the Extract Status to “Ready” through the “Registration Extract Status” form in Anthology Student. This form is located in the menu Daily > Academic Records > Registration Extract Status.
Note: This form cannot be used in conjunction with the Student Course Registration APIs. Similarly, the mechanism used in Student Course Registration APIs for marking records for retransmit cannot be used with the new APIs.
Migration from Student Course Registration APIs to Registration Action APIs
To cut over from legacy Student Course Registration APIs to the new WCF based Registration Action APIs, use the FromActivityDate property in the GetRegistrationActions API input message. The FromActivityDate property represents the time of occurrence of the registration action. By specifying the last runtime of legacy API in this property, the records already extracted by legacy API will not be fetched by the new API. Ensure that the records are acknowledged by the legacy Acknowledgement API.
Legacy Acknowledgement API will only acknowledge the records fetched by the Legacy Get API, while the new Acknowledgement API only acknowledges the records fetched by the new Get API.
