Best practices for FTP upload

To start using the Parent Portal and Parent Settings, you must upload a CSV file that maps the student-parent relationship within your school.  Securly utilizes this CSV to send student activity reports to parents.

You can upload the CSV files via Securly Filter or FTP*.  If you choose to use FTP for the CSV upload, please follow the guidelines below for a smooth experience.

1. Install an FTP client (such as FileZilla or WinSCP).
2. Before uploading, ensure that the hostname is ‘securly.brickftp.com’.
   
   Your username can be found in Securly Home by navigating to Parents, clicking the three-dot icon and selecting Set Up/Configure FTP. 
   
   You can also change the password from here. 
   

1. If you encounter problems connecting to the SFTP server, please check your firewall settings and ensure that you have allowed connection to securly.brickftp.com over outbound port tcp/22.
2. Ensure that the name of your file is ‘parents.csv’.  Any other file name will cause the file to be deleted.
3. If you need to update an existing CSV, upload the same CSV with the updated fields.  Our system will overwrite the existing file.  
4. If the file's name is ‘parents.csv’ but the file is not in CSV format, it will be deleted during the verification process.
5. You can only upload one file at any given time.  If you attempt to upload more than one file, any additional file other than ‘parents.csv’ will be deleted.
6. Your file should not be more than 150 MB.  If you need to upload a bigger file, please contact our support team at support@securly.com
7. You will experience file processing errors if your CSV does not fulfill any of the following requirements:
   • A header line specifying the name of each column is essential.
   • The header line should include Parent First Name, Parent Last Name, Parent Email, Student First Name, Student Last Name, and Student Email.
   • The student email must belong to your school domain or sub-domain.  Other email addresses will be rejected.
   • Student email ID or parent email ID cannot be the same as the admin email ID.
   • More than one parent email or student email on one line is not allowed.  Each CSV line should establish a 1:1 mapping between student and parent.
   • You can use single and double quotation marks in your CSV for individual fields.  The text contained within quotation marks even when separated by a comma (,) is treated as one field.  Note that a comma within a single quotation mark will lead to an error. 

*Note that we use the SFTP File Protocol to ensure that your file transfers are totally secure.

WinSCP client exceptions
Before you begin uploading your CSVs, you will need to disable temporary filename creation when transferring your files.  To do this:
1.  Navigate to Options > Preferences in your WinSCP client.
2.  Scroll down to Endurance and select Disable under the 'Enable transfer resume/transfer to temporary filename for' field.
3.  Click 'OK'.

This is necessary to avoid upload failures caused due to temporary file names that do not match the parent.csv filename requirement.

Also, ensure that you close the client after use to avoid sending repeated requests to Securly.

Note that if you use an automated script to upload your CSVs via WinSCP, the manual settings above might interfere with your script.  To avoid this, please add the following to your script.

resumesupport=off 

Input command line to prevent Endurance transfer resume.

If you choose to upload via the Securly Filter web interface, please follow the guidelines here.