Right API to collect recently-added/removed students/staff?

Michael Sheasby

A question about reflecting updates from Blackbaud in our own platform

(e.g. a new student at a Blackbaud school should be added to our database)

Today we are able to pull complete rosters and updates for existing students from Blackbaud, but it seems that students added after our first synch are not presented to us.

This is how we are fetching data:

1. At first we do full sync and get all the students and staff (works fine):

https://api.sky.blackbaud.com/school/v1/users/extended?base_role_ids={id}

1. We use the following API to get updates about changes were made in Blackbaud:

https://api.sky.blackbaud.com/school/v1/users/changed?base_role_ids={role_id}&start_date={"2023-05-25"}

The problem is: the second API is not returning newly added students or staff … we only receive changes to existing individuals.

Which API should we use to get a list of recently added or removed individuals?

Thanks for any guidance,

--The High5 Team—

Stephen Boyle

@Michael Sheasby
Good point on the ../changed endpoint. I'll have the team review that endpoint to determine what changes we can make to address the issue.

Michael Sheasby

@Stephen Boyle
I understand you to mean that currently, the /changed api indeed only gets updates to existing individuals and not new or deleted individuals
… and you'll have the developers consider extending the api to handle these two cases.

In the meantime, to be sure, do we have an alternative to pulling the complete database using the first endpoint listed above? That method is not ideal, because our only choices are to do a complete clear & re-import (losing all data we've added to individuals) or add some kind of extra timestamp data to all our individuals, import everything into a parallel database, and then merge… which is inelegant and expensive. Is there some other API you would suggest to accomplish what we need while waiting for /changed to be upgraded?

Stephen Boyle

@Michael Sheasby
Unfortunately not. I'm going to check with the dev team to see if there is something I'm not thinking of, however. If so, I'll jump back here and post it.