Say hey to Eddie Lynx, our new AI chatbot

by Dakota Gordon

Not getting the help you need (when you need it most) can be a frustrating problem, regardless of your role. Maybe you're a software engineer who can't quite figure something out in the docs, or maybe you're an implementation specialist who is having trouble onboarding a school district.

Edlink is striving to solve a pretty complicated set of problems, and sometimes that means providing a solution with a bit of a learning curve. We're also releasing new features at a pretty rapid clip, and sometimes that means our docs and guides can fall behind our product.

We're sure this is a pretty common experience amongst many companies and we wanted to take a stab at solving it for our clients.

Introducing Eddie Lynx

We've trained up a chatbot called Eddie Lynx using the entire corpus of data about Edlink. This includes our technical documentation, our blog, and our knowledge base. You can access Eddie by clicking the "Ask the AI" button in the top-right corner of the Edlink dashboard.

Eddie can answer many questions that you have about Edlink (both technical, and non-technical). If you ask, Eddie can even write code in your language of choice.

He is still a little bit rough around the edges (for a number of reasons), but we're working actively on tightening up his responses. Please let us know if you see anything out of the ordinary!

Other Platform Improvements

  • Edlink will now return null for assignment due date when it is null in the LMS. Some LMSs allow the due date field to be null, but the Edlink API does not. Please note, this does not mean you can send Edlink null values in a request to create an assignment in the LMS.
  • We updated the types library attached to the code editor embedded into the Edlink dashboard so it will now contain the latest versions of all of our new models (and suggest them to you as you code)!
  • We added support for the other_id field in Skyward SMS.
  • We fixed an issue that was preventing periods and subject names to propagate down the pipeline for Classlink integrations (please note, these are different than our new Period and Subject models).
  • We smoothed out an unusual edge case where the Schoology would ignore your chosen assignee_mode when none of the assignee_ids were valid for an assignment.
  • We added support for different versions of authentication when onboarding a new OneRoster connection. We now support OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2.0.
  • We added similar support for our Infinite Campus onboarding flow.
  • We added the staff role to various role dropdowns in our UI. They were previously missing (but available via the API).
  • Fixed an issue that was affecting incidents without a reporter_id.
  • Fixed an issue where the administrator onboarding flow would not correctly save your changes if the source did not validate successfully on the first try.
  • We added some new options so you can customize the behavior of your LTI 1.1 and LTI 1.3 applications in the LMS.
  • Fixed a 500 error that would occur occasionally when you tried to list announcements from Google Classroom.
  • We've made a formal enum for timezone values, instead of allowing them to remain random strings.
  • We've made some upgrades to improve the stability of our sync pipeline.
  • You can now view and edit the code that the AI block outputs.
  • We replaced the "Request Integration" drawer (which was pretty useless) with a button to copy your integration link.
  • We made facility_id a required field for rooms in our data model.
  • Creating v2 assignments will now properly create a gradebook column in the Brightspace gradebook. This was working OK in API v1.
  • Fixed an issue where we were trying to create facilities before rooms in our Veracross sync (which was an issue now that facility_id is required.
  • Added support for escaped column names in our Lynx programming language so you can now import CSV columns with special characters in the name.
  • Fixed an issue with user impersonation when your primary redirect URI contains query params (we were not correctly appending the code).
  • Added some new filters on the integrations page.
  • Made some improvements to the "chips" on the Edlink dashboard.

✌ That's all for now!️