Webinar Instance vs Occurrence and Registrant vs Participant

I’m trying to understand the difference between a webinar, a webinar instance, and an occurrence of a webinar as well as the difference between registrants and participants. I need to be able to present this data in a meaningful way, but because I don’t really know what it is, I can’t do that. The API documentation is not very descriptive.

Here are the details on how I’m trying to gather the data:

I can call Get a Webinar (webinars/webinarID) to get details about a webinar, including an array of occurrences, which in my data is empty even though the recurrence object indicates there should be 5 weekly meetings.

Then I can use this same webinar ID to call List Past Webinar Instances (past_webinars/webinarID/instances), which returns 7 different UUID’s for me.

Next I want to call List Webinar Registrants using the webinar ID. Without including an occurrence ID in the query string, because Get a Webinar didn’t return any, I get 26 total registrants. However, if I call Get Webinar Detail Reports with the same webinar ID, I get 15 participants. The Reports endpoint will also take a UUID instead, and I have tried using each of these UUID’s from the List Past Webinar Instances, none of which return 26.

At this point, I’m guessing that a registrant is everyone who registered for the webinar and the participants are those who actually joined the webinar. So not everyone who registered actually attended (if registrants > participants) or people who attended may not have registered (if participants > registrants). However, List Webinar Registrants uses the webinar ID and Get Webinar Detail Reports, which returns a participants count, uses the webinar instance ID. So I need to understand how a webinar and an instance of the webinar are related.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of links to the relevant API’s. When I tried creating the post, it told me I could only include two links.

Hi @ChrissyC, you are correct about the difference between Registrants & Participants. A registrant is someone who has been authorized to attend (via a unique Join URL provided upon registration). Participants are the individuals who attended the webinar.

(As an aside, there could be scenarios where the participant number is greater than the number of registrants if login is not required and a user leaves and rejoins a webinar.)

A Webinar ID is attached to the created webinar regardless of whether it is recurring. If it is set to recur, or say if it is started/stopped multiple times by the host, an occurrence ID (UUIDs) will be available for each instance.

If a Webinar is set to not recur, and there is only one instance of it starting / stopping, there will still be a UUID available for the webinar occurrence (only one).

Hope this helps, let us know if there is anything we can clarify!

Hi. Sorry for joining the thread with a question but this is exactly the question I have except it is for meeting in my question.

@michael.zoom - you said:

Can you explain where is that UUID value that I am sure @ChrissyC was also looking? Occurrence data in Get Webinar (or meeting in my case) API contains the following info only. Yes, there is an occurrence_id but it is nothing other than a timestamp and means only something with the meeting ID. But there is no endpoint that we can use it to retrieve the corresponding meeting instance.

I even looked into the dashboard reports script code and it is joining the meeting ID and occurrence_id 831100000002020-07-25 19:00:00 as meetingId value but this is not mentioned anywhere. Start time is never equal to the actual meeting start time, so we can’t use that value to find a match.

Could you please tell us how we can link occurrence and participants in that occurrence?

Thank you.

Hey @smozgur,

Did I answer your question in this thread?

Thanks,
Tommy

Thanks for the reply, @tommy.

Unfortunately no. As I mentioned in all posts I sent during the week, there is no way to find corresponding participants for a meeting occurrence without meetingUuid listed in the occurrences array. So there is no way to get a registrants vs participant report for recurring meetings.

Trying to match an occurrence’s start_time and meeting start time is not something that will help while it should be solved by injecting meetingUuid into the occurrences array as an absolute solution.

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Gotcha @smozgur.

We are working on a solution for this.

Thanks,
Tommy