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Recent change to grade_level field?

Dan Bonville

We noticed with a few of our shared clients that we were getting different values in the grade_level field for students in the Users endpoints.

Previously we would expect a value like ‘9’, whereas now, at least with some clients we are seeing something like "grade_level": "09 ", (including whitespaces).

Was this from a recent change? We can work around it, for sure, but changes like this can have some cascading effects in our own software.

Thanks!

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Jared Harbour

This was a recent change. We found that the grade_level field being returned was no longer being updated, and the active data was being stored in a new location. Along with this change we included grade_level_id, which is a much better way to keep track of a grade level.

Michael Panagos

There really needs to be better notification about breaking changes because this broke a couple of our automations. This isn't even listed in the November changelog along with the new information added to “student_info” so I am assuming it may be a bug.

Edit: I just noticed that not only does it change single digit numbers from “4” to “04”, etc. it also adds spaces so that the length is 6. So for example “4” is really “04____” (where “_” is a space; I noticed OP indicated this but the formatting removed the extra spaces so I didn't realize).

Jared Harbour

The spaces are a new wrinkle that we haven't seen before. The data is coming from the table values that are managed by each school, and from what I can tell do not contain any spaces. I will investigate the spaces issue further and I will make sure any changes get documented properly.

Michael Panagos

Jared Harbour:
This was a recent change. We found that the grade_level field being returned was no longer being updated, and the active data was being stored in a new location. Along with this change we included grade_level_id, which is a much better way to keep track of a grade level.

I agree this is definitely better. However, I am noticing that the grade-level ID returned by Users Extended by User does not match the grade-level ID returned by Core grade levels.

Michael Panagos

Jared Harbour:
The spaces are a new wrinkle that we haven't seen before. The data is coming from the table values that are managed by each school, and from what I can tell do not contain any spaces. I will investigate the spaces issue further and I will make sure any changes get documented properly.

Thank you. I would like to request not only documentation of changes but prior notification of breaking changes so we have time to update any code before release.

Michael Panagos

Update: It looks like the spaces are caused by a change to the grade levels table in the database. The web interface seems to trim the extra spaces when viewing the table (Core > Settings > General Settings > Table values) and when running lists. If you open the “Grade Level” table on the website and save it the values are properly saved to the database without the extra whitespace at the end and the API queries do not show them.

Brian Gray

Thanks, Michael! The quick process you described fixed it for me.

Michael Panagos

For anyone subscribed to this thread, Blackbaud has changed this API endpoint again without notice. Nothing in the changelog and the endpoint documentation has not yet been updated.

student_info now returns an array similar to the following:

@{grade_level_id=1234; grad_year=2031; grade_level=3; grade_level_description=Grade 3; grade_level_abbreviation=03; grade_level_name=Grade 3}

Understandably, they have reverted the ‘grade_level’ field back to to the numerical format (-1 for PK, 0 for Kindergarten, 1 for Grade 1, etc.) like it was before.

Blackbaud has also added in a ‘grade_level_abbreviation’ field that returns the grade level abbreviation, as the name suggests.

If you had previously updated your code to work around the earlier change where grade_level returns the grade level abbreviation value, you need to revert your code or alternatively use the 'grade_level_abbreviation' field.