Change OrgUnit type via Valence

Question

I'm attempting to change the type of one custom orgunit to another to correct an error that was made previously.

Doing: GET /d2l/api/lp/1.4/orgstructure/6770

Results in:

{
   "Identifier": "6770",
   "Name": "Art",
   "Code": "ART",
   "Type": {
       "Id": 101,
       "Code": "Department",
       "Name": "Department"
   }
}

I then take that data and run it through PUT /d2l/api/lp/1.4/orgstructure/6770 as per the documentation however I change the data to be:

{
   "Identifier": "6770",
   "Path": "/content/",
   "Name": "Art",
   "Code": "ART",
   "Type": {
       "Id": 103,
       "Code": "Discipline",
       "Name": "Discipline"
   }
}

Essentially only adding a "Path" property because it issues a 404 without it. As well as changing the type to a Discipline rather than Department. However the object returned is identical to the original without updating any of the type information.

Any suggestions to how to fix this? Deletion and recreation at this point is not a feasible option at all. Because both of these are "custom" org unit types I would imagine an update like this shouldn't be difficult.

Answer 1

This is an oversight in the documentation, combined with a somewhat awkward evolution of the API. The documentation has now been updated to be more clear on this situation:

The update orgunit properties call can only update the Name, Code, or Path properties of an orgunit, not it's Identifier (sensibly) or it's Type. (I do not believe there is a way to update the type of an org unit, once created, even in the Web UI for the LMS -- you likely have to create a new org unit, re-assign parent and children relationships as appropriate, and then drop the old unit.)

Unfortunately, you must provide a valid, good Path for the org unit, and the simple call to fetch a single org unit's properties won't tell you what the current one is.

If you don't already know what the path is, and should be, then you'll need to call the route to fetch back a list of org unit records, find the exact one that matches yours (by Identifier, or by matching on several properties like Code and Name), and then send back that Path dispensed in the record sent back there. (Note that you're strongly advised to scope the call to fetch back a list of org unit records by filtering on type, code, and/or name, and the call is paged, so you may have to proceed with it several times if you don't scope down the call enough, to find the particular org unit record in question.)