SKY API endpoint role restrictions

Doug Alford

A couple of years ago I built out a web tool for my school to act as an enhanced Student Assignments Viewer. One of the main drivers for building this tool was to allow parents to grant access to outside tutors to view the Assignments for a student without having to on-board these tutors into Blackbaud Education Management. Moreover, this was done in a headless way where all of the authorizations were handled behind the scenes using my own credentials.

I've just come to learn that the tool no longer works because the GET Academic Assignments for Student endpoint now only works with OAuth authorizations from the Parent or Student role of the student subject of the lookup.

Question 1) When did this role restriction on the endpoint change? I've searched the changelogs and can find no reference to this added restriction by role.

Question 2) Why would role restrictions be put in place on SKY API routes when the authorizing entity (me) has unfettered access to all of this information through my administrative roles in the Education Management system to begin with?

Question 3) How was it decided that only a Parent or Student role should have access to a student's Assignment statuses? If an academic dean at our school wanted me to build an automated reporting tool of Assignment Statuses for a list of students on their watchlist, not only would my credentials not be enough to solicit that information in the SKY API, but the Academic Dean's credentials wouldn't be enough either even if I scrapped the headless aspect of the authorizations.

Moreover, even if there existed a Tutor role within Education Management, and we had to go through the overhead of registering these outside folks within Blackbaud, these tutors still would not be able to access the Assignments of their charges because they wouldn't have the Role of Parent or Student in the system.

It's frustrating when the APIs being provided seem to cater to what works best for outside software vendors at the expense of internal development by the schools themselves.

Thank you for your attention.