Student information system (SIS) integrations allow us to configure various settings to adapt the integration to the multiple use cases we may have.
Once we create the integration and configure its basic options, we can edit it to create those specific configurations.
Selecting What an Integration Can Do
Go to Admin Center > Integrations > Student Information System Integrations and, for the integration you want to modify, click Edit in the context menu. At the bottom of the page, you will see options that control what our integration can do for each type of data that we can manage with it.
If we want to have an integration that can only be used to load users, we will need to disable the creation and editing of all other types of data, and select only creation for users (the "Person" type), disabling edits and deletions as well.
With these combinations, we can create very specific integrations, or very open and flexible ones, depending on our needs.
Note that by default, many types of data do not allow deletion, and if we send a deletion command, the integration will disable the data instead. This is configured this way, first, to protect us from accidents, and second, because losing this data would be irreparable (for example, deleting users or enrollments would result in data loss). Other data, such as nodes, can be deleted by default, but deleting a node only requires creating it again and re-associating the courses with it, so it is much less destructive.
That said, if you want to create an integration to delete courses in bulk (for example, when we clean up the environment), you can edit the options at the bottom and allow deletion for courses. The task will be queued, and the courses will be deleted one by one.
Modifying How Data Loaded from the Integration Is Saved
From the list of integrations, click Advanced settings in the context menu of the integration you want to modify. A list of all data types will appear, along with the permission settings selected for each one. You can see whether the integration can delete, add, or edit data.
In the context menus for each data type, you will be able to edit where each piece of data loaded from the file will be saved.
Field mapping will allow you to select which Blackboard field each field from the file will be saved in. For example, we could save the email file field in the institutional email profile field.
We can also enable certain fields to be changed to the value from the file, such as the password, which is not enabled by default, or decide what happens when the data is invalid (skip, set to null, or use the default value)
Custom headers will allow us to edit the names of the headers in the file to be uploaded.
There is a special case for the Course object type, which has one additional option in the context menu: Course copy settings. This option will allow us to create courses that are exact copies of another course (users and content), or to add content to existing courses by copying all the content from one course to others that already had existing content / users. This is achieved by selecting Copy material from source course and checking the boxes below for what we want to copy.
The result will be courses with the material that already existed, plus all the material from the course used as a template.
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