Manipulating differentiated assignments via API

[maguire]

Has anyone tried changing the "Assigned to" group for a differentiated assignment via the Canvas API? What is the element that identifies to whom the assignment is assigned?

Scenario: I have some assignments that were assigned to Everyone, now due to the addition of a new section that will have different due dates, I want to mechanically change all of the assignments to Everyone into assignments to all of the other sections except for the new section and I want to add the new section with a new due date.

[James]

Chip,

Which API call are you trying to use? I'm looking at the Create an assignment override endpoint from the Assignments API. There is a batch create overrides in a course endpoint as well.

There are a couple of options there for determining who gets the override.

• assignment_override[student_ids][] allows you to set it for several students at the same time.
• assignment_override[course_section_id] allows you to set it for an entire section.

There is also an Update an assignment override endpoint, but you have to create an override before you can update it. There's also a warning with this one: All current overridden values must be supplied if they are to be retained;

You can't set "everyone else" with this. Changing the date for everyone is handled through the Edit an assignment endpoint.

One thing I do if I'm not sure what to do from the documentation is to open the developer tools in the browser and watch the network call that Canvas makes when I try to do whatever it is I'm wanting to automate.

[maguire]

Thanks @ @James  , I have been looking at the assignment overrides based on Section Assignment (regarding the assignment_override[course_section_id] ) and hope to do something more this weekend, but have ~70 groups final research papers (of 10-12 pages each) to read & grade for one course and ~10 assignments for another course to grade before I can get back to this.  The problem is that I have ~17 students in this new section but 163 in the rest of the course and do not want to cause problems for the 163-17 students.