Build a Teacher-Facing Roster App

Build a teacher-facing app that uses Clever SSO to identify a teacher and Secure Sync to retrieve that teacher’s classes and students.

Prerequisites

Configure SSO and Secure Sync for your application.
Configure a production HTTPS redirect URI.
Store the district-app token for each connected district.

Understand the two-token flow

Use the OAuth user access token to identify the teacher who signed in. Use the district-app token to retrieve roster data. The user access token cannot list sections or students.

1. Authenticate the teacher

Support Clever Portal, Instant Login, and Log in with Clever entry points. Exchange the returned authorization code on your server; codes expire after one minute and can be exchanged once.

Make the callback handler idempotent. In native iOS apps, Safari and the app can both deliver the same code.

For the full OAuth flow, see OAuth Implementation.

2. Identify the signed-in teacher

Call /v3.0/me with the user access token. Use the returned Clever user ID and district ID to establish your application session.

If you need to account for every role a person holds, retrieve the user record with the district-app token and inspect roles.

3. Retrieve sections with the district-app token

Call GET /v3.1/users/{teacher_id} with the district-app token. Follow the user record’s sections relationship to retrieve the teacher’s sections.

Do not filter sections by the teacher’s primary school. A teacher can teach at multiple schools, and a section’s school can differ from the teacher’s primary school.

4. Retrieve students

Each section includes its student IDs. Retrieve a full student record only when your app needs fields beyond the IDs.

If a record returns 404 because it is not shared with your app, archive the local record when present or skip it when absent. Continue processing the rest of the roster.

5. Render the teacher experience

Show all retrieved sections and their students. Render an empty state when a teacher has no sections. Use Clever user IDs as your primary keys; do not use email or sis_id as primary identifiers.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
`/me` works but roster calls fail	A user access token was used where a district-app token is required.
Classes appear incomplete	Your app filtered sections by primary school.
Code exchange fails on iOS	The same authorization code was delivered twice.