ISSUE: Attendance by section update

Question

We're implementing a quick way for teacher/coaches to take quick attendance for a class meeting on our mobile app.  I just need  to report  PRESENT | TARDY | ABSENT, the basic statuses teachers normally get in the web tools.

This endpoint below seems the way to do it per section:

POST /v1/attendance/sections/{section_id}/attendance

However, the sample body  for request is is this:

{
    "meeting_start_time": "2021-09-30T02:20:00Z",
    "mark_class_canceled": false,
    "reported_by": 11,
    "student_attendances": [{
        "student_user_id": 10,
        "excuse_type_id": 153,
        "comment": "College Trip"
    }]
}

It takes an  excuse_type_id  which is possibly ok if we had a list of the excuse types. Which I guess get come from here:   GET /v1/types/excusedtypes

But none of schools we work with have any response from that endpoint.  The tokens have the Attendance Manager  roles, but the response is always:

{    "count": 0,    "value": []}

What I think I should want to send is this type from GET /v1/types/attendancetypes

{
    "present": 1,
    "absence": 2,
    "tardy": 3
}

What can we do to create this basic attendance feature?

@Todd DeSchuiteneer  @Stephen Boyle

Ruben Perez · Answer

Hey @Stephen Boyle   that makes sense.  We are using an account with appropriate permissions (Attendance Manager) to make the POST,   what I wasn't sure about was whether or not there was some separate parent-centric fields or anything like that which were outside what the Sky API integrates with..

We'll do some tests with some schools and see how they wan to use it and find out where the fit is.

Thanks!

Stephen Boyle · Answer

When you write attendance from your app, you can use the authorization permissions, which would have Attendance Manager. So, if you give parents a way to indicate attendance in your app, you should be able to pass it on to BEM. And while I'm not positive the reported_by field can be the parents user id, but I think it can.

Note, it isn't the parent's login that would be sending the attendance. They'd, essentially, send the attendance info to your service, and you could send it to BEM on their behalf.

Ruben Perez · Answer

Hey guys, yes this is now working, we're able retrieve  the types.    We also now have a working version of this attendance taking for teacher,  working on getting a school or two to use it.

One question I got from a few schools… "Does this mean we can build this new Parent attendance reporting into our app?"

I'm not sure how the endpoints interact with this new parent-driven feature.  We can create attendance records with reasons, but can we do this on behalf of parents?  This would be a nice add-on.

(I then will add the Carplay/Android Auto version where parents can report being late while stuck in traffic)

Thank you!