It seems every school is replacing its LMS these days. Though the migration of content is painful enough, many come to find that one of the most challenging – yet often ignored – aspects of the transition is reconfiguring or rebuilding all the third-party integrations.
One of our clients was no exception. They were switching from Blackboard 9 to Canvas. Among other things, Canvas promises a superior user experience and that they (like Blackboard) support Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) for a smooth changeover. The interface we can agree upon, but LTI implementation not so much.
Turns out Blackboard LTI can pass users under a variety of parameters, such as user_id or lis_person_sourcedid. The equivalent in Canvas is custom_canvas_user_login_id. What?
Prior to Apidapter the client could have done one of two things. They could build their own custom integration with every third party tool to account for this change. Or you could pay vendors to extend their implementations. In either case it’s wasted time and money.
Fortunately for them using Apidapter they could make this switch in less than 60 seconds. Take the existing adapter which is passing user_id, click one time to insert a component to Copy the user_id to custom_canvas_user_login_id upon every LTI launch.
Done.