Data Model Quirks and Supported Features

Data in Clever can experience a number of edge cases listed below. Although these are not typical cases, it's a good idea to be prepared for these to occur. If your integration cannot handle any of these cases, please reach out to [email protected] to create Data Warnings to avoid any errors in your sync

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Users (new to v3.0)

Users are merged across employees of a district (District Admins, Staff, Teachers) only. This means that it's possible for two users to have the same email address if the email address is also associated with a Student or Contact

If a district changes email addresses for a record, this can cause a User record to get a new Clever ID or for a merged User to be split into multiple users

Full contact name will be stored in the last_name field of the user object.

General

The district is the top-level object in Clever; even if a single school has signed up for an account, there will still technically be a district object for their account.
Clever's strings have no maximum length (if you must specify a field length, we recommend 255 chars as a safe limit)
Clever's strings support all UTF-8 characters
There isn't a normalization of email format (emails may be missing the '@' sign)

Terms

Most districts do not send actual terms to Clever, so most are constructed from information on the section object. As such, districts must sync at least one of term name term start date or term end date in order for a term to be created
If all of the sections associated with a term are deleted or the term information changes, the term will be deleted (and potentially recreated).
As of 1/31/18, term IDs are not stable, so if a term is deleted and recreated, it will have a new Clever ID.

Courses

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Changes for Back to School 2023
Beginning in January 2023, Clever is changing how we process course data to make courses more stable. If districts provide a course_number for a course, we will use it as the key ID for the course. This means that:

If there are multiple courses with the same course_number we will merge them into one course.

If changes are made to course_name but course_number remains stable, we will update the course name instead of deleting and recreating courses.

These changes will released in January 2023 for a small number of districts. We expect to finish rolling out to all districts before Back to School 2023.

Most districts do not send actual courses to Clever, so most are constructed from information on the section object. As such, districts must sync at least course_name in order for a course to be created
If all of the sections associated with a course are deleted or the course information changes, the term will be deleted (and a new one may be created).
As of 1/31/18, course IDs are not stable, so if a term is deleted and recreated, it will have a new Clever ID.

Sections

Sections are the only way student and teacher associations are described in Clever. If a student or teacher is not enrolled in any sections, they will not be associated with any students/teachers.
Sections must have at least one student
Sections are associated with a school, but the associated students and teachers in the section can be enrolled in any school in the district.
Sections can have only one primary teacher, and up to 9 additional co-teachers.
There is no limit of how many students may be enrolled in a section
Section names are not guaranteed to be unique
Section grade might not match all students grades

Students

Students can be enrolled in multiple sections
Students might not be enrolled in any sections
Students can be enrolled in sections in multiple schools
Students can be enrolled in sections that contain other students and teachers that are not associated with their primary school

Teachers

Teachers can teach multiple sections
Teachers might not teach any sections
Teachers can teach sections in multiple schools
Teachers can teach classes that contain other students and teachers that are not associated with their primary school

School Administrators

School administrators can be in multiple schools
School administrators do not have a primary school association (there is only a schools field, not a school field at the /school_admins endpoint

Student Contacts

Not a guaranteed field from Clever
Contact type is not consistent (type varies from SIS to SIS)
Information might be limited to one contact per student
Full contact name will be stored in the last_name field of the user object.