[ARCHIVED] Change in behavior for file links with new Rich Content Editor

harryhahne
Community Member

The new Rich Content Editor has changed the behavior when creating a link to a file in a content page. In the old editor, when you created a link to a file and disabled in-line preview, the file would automatically download to the user's computer. The new behavior is that Canvas opens the file in a new browser tab.

The unfortunate result is that if you are adding new file links in an existing course, all new file links will behave differently from old file links. This inconsistent behavior is confusing to the student and looks tacky.

I have to go through hundreds of file links in dozens of courses and manually change every link so I can get consistent behavior. I have to manually edit the URL to each file and delete the "download" parameter in existing links to get the new behavior. This is very tedious. There is no parameter that can  be changed to make the behavior between old and new links consistent. Editing an existing link keeps the old behavior.

I would like to see a checkbox in the Link Options called "Download File". This would allow the course creator to add new file links that are consistent with existing file links.

Perhaps at sometime in the future I will go back and modify all of my existing links to conform to the new behavior, but I don't have time to do this before classes open on Monday. It is frustrating to discover this change in behavior in the final hour of tweaking courses that go live soon.

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