[ARCHIVED] How do I create an internal mailto link?

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lbarry
Community Novice

As an administrator customizing our help menu, I would love to set up a link similar to a mailto link but to message a specific person using the internal Canvas conversations tool. This is preferable to using a standard mailto link since many of our students do not have their browser/email program properly set up to use mailto links. I also prefer not directing them out of Canvas if I can help it.

One example of using this (as in our case), is to message the person who does QA for all the courses' content, to report an error.

Is there some way of structuring a link to do this? I imagine it would be something like ....instructure.com/conversations/[somehow insert user to message here]

 

I have been looking for any documentation on this but no joy thus far. Please direct me to it if you know of any info I cannot find.

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1 Solution

Okay, so thanks to some testing done by carroll-ccsd and some follow-up testing I did this morning, I think we have identified where things go wrong.

From observation, it appears that the conversation system operates as follows:

  1. Check if the user is authorized to look up the intend recipient
    1. If they can, proceed without concern for relationships and context
    2. If they can't, check to see if the user has a relationship with the intended recipient
      1. If they do, check to see if the supplied context_id matches the relationship context_id
        1. If it does, proceed as valid
        2. If it doesn't, err "context_code invalid"
      2. If they don't, err "recipients invalid"

What does this mean?

It means my original answer is incorrect!

There is not a valid way to make a static link that will work for all users without setting up a "catch all" shell where all users are enrolled and the context_id defined for that shell. Users with rights granting them access to the account-level People page will be able to use those links (/conversations?user_name=:short_name&user_id=:user_id), but the average user won't.

This doesn't mean a valid link can't be applied within individual course shells, it's just that the link will need to be customized to each shell and it won't automatically update when the shell is copied. If you set the link to course 74 to /conversations?user_name=:short_name&user_id=:user_id&context_id=course_74 and copy it to shell 76 the link in the new shell will still say "context_id=course_74").

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