Great work!!!  It’s just too bad this isn’t a built-in report since this chews up quite a few operations with a tool like Integromat.

This is very nice, agree with elamast, how are you mitigating the api usage s this seems to potentially burn more than the recommended hourly use in its own?

What frustrates me the most about this is the fact that the surveys are just data in a large database and we (Docebo team, really) cannot write a query to spit out the information we need. Or am I looking at this too simplistically?

It really depends on how many courses you have.  However, I should probably point out the “old fashioned” way that’s good for a limited number of courses:

1. Navigate through Course Management to the course.
2. Go to the Reports tab
3. Click on Training material statistics
4. Click on the survey/poll link (left side)
5. In the pop-up window, export the results.

There is something listed in the API-browser under the “report” service that indicates there’s a Query Builder tool which appears to use SQL. However, I don’t know if it’s available to customers, and if so, what Docebo charges for it.  It seems like it would be very helpful for those of us who do a lot of “out of the box” work with the platform.

Yeah unfortunately they don’t seem to make it available to the public, its mostly there since the company utilizes the api themselves. 

I agree on the surface this should be a fairly easy report type setup, but as with most things, without seeing the underlying architecture there could be all sorts of ‘gotchas’ we simply have no way of knowing about which make this not quite as straight forward an ask.

That’s only half of it, because the downloaded data does not contain the name of the course, unless it was asked in the form (but then users often get the wrong one). When compiling 300+ Excel file into one, we don’t know what course is getting which feedback. 

is the course name or something similar in the file name at least? That is terrible otherwise. If it was in the file name, would totally find someone who is comfortable with quick windows/mac scripts and have them just look at a folder of excel files, add a column based on file name, then copy all content into one master file and save with a  new name. Dirty, but effective, at least until this report is brought online in a better way.

Unfortunately the files seem to have date/time-based names rather than course-based names.

There are RPA/web scraper type tools that would allow you to automate the download and renaming of the surveys.  The direct link to each follows this pattern:  https://YOURDOMAIN.com/lms/index.php?r=player/report/pollResult&objectId=32&organizationId=1234&course_id=54   A free tool is BrowserAutomationStudio.  Others are UI.Vision, UBot Studio, UiPath…   I personally use BrowserAutomationStudio for the painful task of creating course surveys (takes some time to set up, but was worth it for the number of these I needed to create).

Yeah, the trouble is a lot of those screen scrapping automation tools are a ‘no go’ in corporate environments for security reasons. But totally useful and then could have it re-name things for you and go through merging. I also get nervous on those kinds of setups for anything vital, as a UI change or system change throughs it all off, far more unstable than proper programmatically dealing, another reason surveys within the platform seem almost unusable.

Your point is well-taken about environments that restrict the type of software you can use, and the instability that can come up with UI changes that break a bot/scraper.  End user workarounds are nearly always the result of failing to provide a well-engineered solution for needed functionality.

The “right” solution here depends a bit on skill levels: 1) For everyone there should be much improved reporting capabilities where you can build your own report through a drag/drop function, 2) For skilled users there should be additional API endpoints that will pull the data, and 3) For expert users there should be an ability to do direct SQL queries (read-only would be fine).

I thought I’d share a way I found to get the surveys/course evals programmatically with Integromat.  Other automation tools will work as well with some tweaking.

The above workflow starts with a mailhook that is generated from a PowerApp that has a bunch of admin tools I’ve created to help manage Docebo.

The mailhook is checked to make sure the mailhook came from the right place.

An API call is made to gather all the courses and then iterate through each. (This one assumes there is only one page of results, but it can be modified for more pages.)

Another API call is made to gather all the Learning Objects.  These are iterated through and filtered to only send the Polls to the next step.

I cheated a bit on the next step and found a way to get the UI to help out. Make an OAuth 2.0 GET call to https://www.YOURSITEURL.com/lms/index.php?r=player/report/pollResultExport pasing in the query parameters course_id, organizationId, objectId, and the exportType (csv in my case).  The values of the query parameters are taken from the previous iteration step.

An HTTP “get a file” call is made to the same URL.  The auth from the previous step is used here.  For some reason in Integromat you can’t just make an OAuth file download directly, so we have this odd two-step.

Replace the previous file name with the course code and date/time stamp.

Upload each course’s survey results file to a SharePoint repository.

Nice @elamast ! Similar to the original posters process. My one massive concern with this route is always volume since the API is not that robust and some of these loops with a  lot of courses can hit the 1k calls an hour limit quickly, its such a low limit!

If I remember correctly the API limit is per IP address per hour, so one way of working through this would be to introduce a delay into the workflow.  You could couple that strategy with round-robin’ing requests through a pool of IP addresses (built into some automation tools, but not Integromat) if you have a really large number of LOs to drive up the cycle count.

In my environment the above scenario takes 5 minutes to run and uses 727 operations (every step, and every iteration is an operation).  I currently have 244 courses in my catalog, so for me this is roughly 3 operations per course.  Your mileage may vary.

It is per IP address per hour, so using 75% from one ip for that hour for one process is very limiting, and does not scale, since as soon as you hit roughly 350 courses you literally shouldn’t run it within one hour, and theres only so many hours in the day, and a lot of courses out there, was helping a group last week with thousands.

Running a couple hundred processes that leverage the API to some extentant for various purposes over here so API mitigation techniques are also at front of mind when designing and deciding on pathways constantly.

1,000 per hour is very low, for instance have several products that let me do 10,000 per minute. It’s a very real thing to keep in mind.

I absolutely agree that 1000 per hour is too low.  I should be specific that my workflow had that many operations in Integromat, but the number of API calls was roughly half of that.

Here’s an idea submitted for raising the limit: 

Sweet, upvoting!

You may also want to upvote this idea to allow customer access to the Query Builder tool: 

This is a giant thread and since I’m not a developer (and have a bunch of role-related work to do) I’m really wishing Docebo had SOMEONE who could make this a functional thing. Until then, I guess I can’t get this LMS to report on a standard engagement survey across our curriculum and thus can’t convey a 1:1 ROI value to leadership. :(

It really is just not usable in current form.

You all (y’all out here in Texas) may find this interesting regarding the rate limit:  

Yup, they always say its not a hard limit, but since they can’t guarantee things, when designing production processes need to play nicely with the limit. Still exceptionally low for a cloud based api limit.

That’s super helpful! Thanks a lot! :D

If any of you are using Integromat/Make for automating things with the API, I’m happy to share my blueprint/solution for this built with the logic supplied by @alekwo .  

Does this work for things like tests as well and could it be iFramed onto a page?