Building an App With Student Login

AbdurRahman AbdurR Rana

Hello there,

I was wondering if there was any guide or examples of an app that uses the SKY API for education and uses students to login with their blackbaud ID. I originally thought that building apps for sky api could only be used by admins who allow apps to access data in their system. However, after looking at the endpoint reference for the Education API, I noticed there were some endpoints that would require a student to log in. If anyone could provide more information as to how a student would login to an app, please let me know.

Thanks

Stephen Boyle

@AbdurRahman AbdurR Rana
Hi! The best example of the use of those endpoints would be where the student logs in to a mobile app that shows schedules, assignments and grades. The student is the calling user with respect to the endpoint, so they need to have the right to call the endpoint.

Hope that helps!

AbdurRahman AbdurR Rana

@Stephen Boyle

Hi there. Thanks for the example. I did have a question however. I'm a student that's trying to develop an app for my school. Currently, I'm not able to connect an app with my school's database due to security concerns. I was wondering if it would be possible for my school's administrators to only allow my app to use the get assignment and get schedule endpoints.

Thanks

Bryna Gleich

@AbdurRahman AbdurR Rana You can use the cohort sandbox database, instead of your school's database.

AbdurRahman Rana

@Bryna Gleich
Hi Bryna,

Do you know of anyway I can get the passwords of the sample students within the database so I can login as them and test using their profiles?

Thanks

Bryna Gleich

@AbdurRahman Rana I can't give you passwords.

Ruben Perez

@Stephen Boyle I am developing a mobile app along these lines, streamlining assignment views, etc.

I have access to a Sky Developer cohort instance and am working through the OAuth process to tie it into my application.

What I don't see in my cohort instance are some of the security management features mentioned in the docs, so I'm thinking there are some differences there.

Is it possible to log in as one of the existing demo users? Perhaps if I change their email addresses, though I don't see the option for reset (legacy) passwords, nor a way to enable that setting. I'd like to use an existing demo user because of all the existing classes are already set up, etc. Do I need to create a new one?

Bottom line: How can simulate being a regular user through the Cohort and API?

Thanks!

Stephen Boyle

@Ruben Perez
You will need to have a user with the Student or Parent role and log in to the mobile app as them. The API endpoints that can be called by student and parent users will double-check that the student id passed in to the endpoint (when you ask for a student's class schedule, for instance) is the same id (or the parent of the id) that is logged in. You can get the id of the logged in user with the new /me endpoint.

Ruben Perez

@Stephen Boyle Thank you. I think what was unclear was that the Cohort environment seems to be a shared test environment where lots of folks are editing and testing things. (correct?)

Thus, I can't “take over” an existing student account there and login as them (also correct?)

I was able to create a user through the API, enable them for a Blackbaud Id, log in to that account using Google auth which is all great. Now I'm trying to get that test user through the process of enrolling them to become a full student (so then I can add them to classes, schedules, etc.).

I'm going the all the docs to learn how to do this, if there are any specific resources to speed up this process that would really help as it seems I'll have to learn a good chunk of the platform to get where I need to get to.

For example, now I'm a stuck not being able to approve the candidate's checklists, I get an error on saving the FINAL checklist item, no matter what the final one left, it won't save.

For reference, my cohort environment is:

and the candidate has email: ruben@kleos.com