Find all assignments with no submissions

[matt2]

Hi all! I'm looking for a bit of advice using the Canvas API to find a body of assignments across any of our active courses. Specifically I'm looking for assignments that:

1. are posted to the SIS
2. have an upcoming due date
3. do not yet have any submissions

I'd also like to find what sections each assignment is assigned to. I'm fairly familiar with using the Canvas REST API, so getting started there is not a problem. Rather, the procedure to find all of these seems rather dense. Right now it looks a bit like this:

1. Find all active courses (state = available)
2. Iterate through courses and list all assignments (with post_to_sis = true and bucket = 'upcoming')
3. Iterate through each upcoming assignment and list all submissions and their workflow state

Am I going about this the wrong way? Is there potentially a faster or more elegant way to find this information? So far I've only worked with the traditional REST API, but if there is a better way to do this with GraphQL I'm open to that as well.

Thanks all!

[melodyc_lam · Accepted solution]

It's a solution! But there might be a way to save yourself a call --

There is a boolean in the Assignments JSON object as shown below:

  // If true, the assignment has been submitted to by at least one student
  "has_submitted_submissions": true,

That should tell you if something is submitted by a student (I'm not sure if the test student counts, though.). I believe this is the field that Canvas reads to prevent an assignment with submissions to be unpublished by the teacher.

Hope this helps!

[matt2]

Thanks for the suggestion, that definitely helped! I found after some experimenting that what I was looking for wasn't actually assignments with no submissions, but assignments where no submissions had been graded. Essentially I ended up with a procedure similar to above, but instead of looking at the submission workflow_state, I looked at the graded_at field.

I've also gone through a bit of testing with GraphQL and ultimately came up empty handed. If it offered more features for filtering the data that is returned it might have been a better fit.

[jerry_nguyen]

@matt2 if you wanted a report of ungraded submissions, the best option is to use Canvas Data as it allows you to apply different filters through SQL and also you can get site-wide data. There is a latency depending on Canvas Data version that's available to you ( E.g. Canvas Data 1 is up to 48 hours, the new Canvas Data 2 is 4 hours)

if you need up-to-date data then GraphQL is preferable. As you're aware, filtering in GraphQL is very limited, however, you can use Javascript to filter the data. You can take a look at the code I've implemented to our Canvas for our trainers to view their pending grading submissions: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Developers-Group/Custom-JS-to-display-full-sortable-To-Do-...

[matt2]

Thanks @jerry_nguyen! I did begin learning a bit about GraphQL as part of this project, but I'm still somewhere on the learning curve and need to get a bit more comfortable with it before implementing anything in production. I could probably deal with the latency of the Canvas Data program so I may look into that a bit further. More flexible filtering could really speed up processing this information.

I did take a similar approach to yours and implemented filtering after collection, just not in Javascript.

[jerry_nguyen]

@matt2 

Canvas has 3 separate environments for your instance (production/live, beta, and testing). I usually use beta/testing environment to test my custom javascript/CSS before applying to the live environment 

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/What-is-the-Canvas-beta-environment/ta-p/255260