Table of Contents

Overview
Sign-Up/Installation
Authorization
District Authorization vs. Teacher Authorization
The authorized_by Field

Overview

Clever Library applications are authorized by teachers as opposed to by districts as with the District SSO and Secure Sync integrations.

Sign-Up/Installation

To connect with your application, a teacher will either click "Sign up with Clever" on your application website or they'll find your listing in the Library and click "Install".

Authorization

Next, the teacher should see an authorization screen asking them to authorize the sharing of the sections they teach. See the screenshot below. Please note that the teacher is limited in their authority to share certain student information.

Upon authorization, Clever will proceed to initiate the authentication process by granting an authorization code. More on this can be found in the OAuth and OIDC documentation.

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Teacher Pages

If you're curious about the "pages" mentioned in the screenshot above, see this article. However, it is not particularly relevant to this discussion.

District Authorization vs Teacher Authorization

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Context is important!

In general, district authorization takes precedence over teacher authorization. A Library connection can only be established with a user if your application is not connected to that user's district. If your application supports both a district-level integration as well as the Library one, you may need to consider the flowchart below.

To identify teacher-authorized SSO requests, be sure to look out for the "authorized_by"field at the /me endpoint during SSO. A district SSO integration would show the value "district" instead of "teacher".

{
    "type": "user",
    "data": {
        "id": "****",
        "type": "user",
        "authorized_by": "teacher"
    },
    "links": [
        {
            "rel": "self",
            "uri": "/me"
        },
        {
            "rel": "canonical",
            "uri": "/v3.0/users/****"
        }
    ]
}

The authorized_by Field

Teachers authorize these connections. In order for a student to access a Clever Library application, they must be part of a section belonging to a teacher who has authorized a connection with that application. More on Clever Library can be found in the articles below:

For Teachers: Connecting with Clever Library
For Clever Admins: Managing the Clever Library

Below is an example of how you can identify a Clever Library SSO authentication request using the /me endpoint. Notice "authorized_by" is set to "teacher".

{  
    "type": "user",  
    "data": {  
        "id": "607741faddeea003f1bb6cfd",  
        "type": "user",  
        "authorized_by": "teacher"  
    },  
    "links": [  
        {  
            "rel": "self",  
            "uri": "/me"  
        },  
        {  
            "rel": "canonical",  
            "uri": "/v3.0/users/607741faddeea003f1bb6cfd"  
        }  
    ]  
}