School-specific links are unique, one-time use URLs generated for a single district or university. Unlike generic links, these allow you to track the exact status of a specific customer's setup process. They offer enhanced security by allowing you to set expiration dates and ensuring that a link intended for one district cannot be used by another.
Customizing the Link
Like generic links, you can customize some of the behavior using options available in the Edlink Dashboard.
Here are some common customizations:
- Pre-selecting Providers: You can configure the link to only allow specific data providers (e.g., Clever, Google Classroom) to streamline the onboarding process for your users.
- Branding: You can add your application's branding to the onboarding flow to provide a consistent user experience.
- Custom Terms and Conditions: You can link to your own terms and conditions or privacy policy that users must agree to before completing the integration.
There are also additional options available for school-specific links:
- Expiration Date: You can set an expiration date for the link to ensure it is only valid for a specific timeframe, enhancing security.
- Automatic Approval: You can choose to have the resulting integration automatically approved and activated, bypassing the manual approval step in the dashboard.
- Provider Locking: You can lock the link to a specific provider, forcing the administrator to connect only that system.
- Redirect URI: You can specify a custom redirect URI where users will be sent after completing the integration. This is useful for guiding users back to your application. This parameter is a little bit different than with generic links, as it is tied to the specific onboarding instance (not a global setting).
Tracking and Correlation
One of the limitations of the generic integration link is that it does not support tracking of individual onboarding sessions. If you need to correlate onboarding events with specific users or sessions in your application, consider using school-specific integration links or implement a custom onboarding flow using the embedded onboarding widget.
Creating Links via API
While you can generate these invitations manually in the dashboard, creating them programmatically via the Onboardings API allows you to automate your sales and implementation workflows. This is particularly useful for triggering welcome emails from your CRM or generating setup links dynamically within your application admin panel.
To create a link, send a POST request to https://ed.link/api/v2/teams/:developer_team_id/onboardings.
The request body must include your application_id. You can optionally include a provider_id to force a specific LMS connection (such as Canvas or Schoology) and a redirect_uri to send the user back to your app upon completion. You may also specify an expiration_date to ensure the link is only valid for a specific timeframe.
The API response will contain an onboarding object with a unique id. You construct the final URL by appending this ID to the base onboarding URL format: https://ed.link/onboard/:onboarding_id. Because you generated this ID, you can store it in your database to poll for status updates or associate the resulting integration with your internal customer record automatically.