Generating user accounts
How to generate user accounts and passwords on Synap
New users can only be invited to one group at a time, when you create an invite you if you need the user to be in multiple groups, you may need to wait until they accept the invite. There may be instances you don't want to wait for users to accept an invite before setting content to an account. For example running exams you may want to pre generate accounts and passwords to be handed out to students via a proctoring solution or separately.
🧠 Remember on Synap it is membership in a user group that decides what content someone has access to. Generating users lets you bypass the invites system and will automatically set up a users account, helpful if you're running exams and you want to make sure everyones got the exam email without them having to finish their account set up!
Using Synap's Generate accounts feature you can bulk generate users and passwords from a CSV or do a single account generation from the platform
✋ Before you start
Make sure you have a group set up you want to generate users into
Check the content assigned to that group is correct as users will have access right away
Decide on how to handle passwords (will you ask your users to reset or will you give them their passwords separately)
Decide whether you want your users to get a welcome email or not.
Check your portals user attributes (more here) as you'll need to include required at registration attributes on your import sheet
If you're importing, get your import template off the group this will include your attribute headers
Infromation for generating accounts
name = required
email = required
attributes = If required on registration If you have custom user attributes in your portal, you can add the ID of an attribute as a header in the CSV
password = If you want to give these users a known password, include a password column on the CSV, passwords must be at least 8 characters long, with at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter and one number. If not provided or left blank, a password will be generated for the user and provided to you by email.
📧 Disable welcome emails
On either option for generating accounts, welcome emails can be disabled which is recommended if you're generating accounts to use in test centres of for high stakes exams and you want to hand out passwords manually.
🧍♂️ Generating a single account
On a user group go to Manage > Import users > Generate account
From here you'll get a pop up modal to fill in all of the details of the account. Including name, email and password which are all required. If you disable the welcome email you must provide values for any attributes that are required on registration. Go to Settings > Data Management > User attributes to see which attributes are required on platform.
Once you've inputted all the information, as soon as you click generate a user account will be set up and you'll find them in the users table for the group. Be mindful that if you have any content set to that group that has automated emails - your new user will get those automatically.
Bulk Generating accounts
You can create a CSV with multiple accounts and passwords you want to generate. You must use different passwords for each user on your sheet. Go to the group you want to generate users in then Manage> Import users > Download CSV template >Generate accounts. The template you download will be custom based off the attributes you have on your portal. Your attribute values must be formatted properly and attributes that are set to required on registration must have values for each user in a row and those values must be in the correct format
Attribute types and required CSV format
| Attribute type | Expected value on CSV |
|---|---|
Checkbox |
|
Long answer |
|
Short answer |
|
Multiple choice | One of defined |
Checkboxes | defined |
Number | Any numerical value |
Date |
|
Link | Choose whether to display as text or as a button. The link can be typed as an absolute URL (opens in new tab), or a root-relative URL (open in the same tab) |
password | Must be at least 8 characters long, with at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter and one number. And unique for each row. |
Format your sheet set making sure you have all the correct and compulsory information set on each row. In the example below the sheet has been colour coded with the default compulsory fields of name, email, password are highlighted in yellow, with 2 compulsory at registration attributes shown in red. And the non compulsory attributes in green, you can see some of these are left blank
From here save that sheet as a CSV and upload it to platform. If there are any errors you'll be notified of any formatting errors and the upload won't happen for any users.
Once your accounts have been generated you'll be sent a summary sheet confirming the passwords and other information that was created with the user. Double check this to make sure all the information is right.
🚨 Remember users can change their passwords at any time, so your record for a users initial password may not always be their actual password!
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