Addressing Issues with Canvas Connections

This guide is meant for people familiar with Canvas who are trying to troubleshoot issues their users are seeing while using Instant Login. If you're just getting started with Canvas and Clever, take a look at the article on Setting up Instant Login with Canvas. To identify issues in your Instant Login Setup, view your Instant Login Event Logs.

Normally, when a user clicks "Log in with Canvas," Clever will send the user out to Canvas where they will enter their username and password. Clever never sees this username and password, but Canvas will redirect the user back to Clever with a token confirming the user logged in successfully. If it's the user's first time logging into Clever with Canvas, they may have to also approve Clever as an app they want to use. Clever will then "match" the Canvas user with a user in Clever, and log them into their app.

Unfortunately, in the real world errors do occur - here are the common ones that we identify, and how to resolve them:

• no_match: The unique identifier passed to us from the Canvas did not match any user in Clever. In essence, a user (let's call her "Susan") was successfully able to prove who she was to Canvas, but when Canvas came to tell Clever "Hey, can you log Susan in for me?", we responded "Sorry, we don't have a Susan here". The most common cause of this is a user trying to log in that is not yet synced to Clever, but it could also be that the field we match on, say student number or email address, is missing in the SIS upload the user in question. We show the matches we tried to make in your Instant Login Event Logs, so check there and then look up the corresponding information in your SIS and/or Clever Data Browser to see what might be going on.
  
  
• no_code: When a user logs in to Clever for the first time using Canvas, they are asked to give permission. If they deny permission, we don't get a valid code to log them in with, and throw this error. Ask the user to try again, and accept the permissions to use Clever.
  
  
• no_token: A fairly rare error, this indicates Canvas had an issue while we were attempting to log the user in. This can indicate that Canvas had a temporary network glitch, or that there is a bug. If you are seeing this error occur frequently, please reach out as soon as possible to Clever Support so we can work with Google and help you troubleshoot.
  
  
• unknown_error: Unfortunately you encountered an error that we had never seen before. This should also be very rare, and if you ever run into one of these, please let us know so that we can address the issue.