Edlink exposes attendance data from connected SIS sources through the Graph API. This includes student day-level and period-level attendance. Not every model or field will be present in every integration. Availability depends on the source SIS and the permissions granted to your integration.
Use Cases
- Safety and emergency applications: Use current-day attendance visibility to support safety workflows and location tracking during the school day.
- Analytics and reporting: Track absences, tardies, and attendance patterns across days, periods, or classes.
- Parent and guardian notifications: Alert families when a student is marked absent or has a flagged attendance record.
- Operational tools: Build hall pass systems, student checkout workflows, and other apps that need to know whether a student is present or absent today.
How Attendance Data Is Organized
Most integrations use Meeting and Attendance. A Meeting defines when attendance can be taken, either for a school day or a class period. An Attendance record captures a person's outcome for that meeting.
For integrations that need more detail, Edlink also offers expanded attendance models. These split student attendance into day-level and period-level records, add staff period attendance, and support presence intervals, district-specific states/outcomes/flags, and virtual interaction metadata. The expanded models are optional and currently in beta. See The Attendance Data Model for the more complete breakdown and API links.
Edlink stores attendance exceptions (absences and flagged records), not a record for every present student. See Positive and Negative Attendance for why this matters and how to interpret the data.
Availability
- Not all SIS providers expose attendance data through Edlink.
- Expanded attendance models may not be available on all integrations yet.
- Near Realtime Attendance is currently available for PowerSchool only.