SSO with web apps

[BrendanRRyan]

We provide a web app that is widely used in Canvas (along with other LMS providers like BB). Our app has just implemented SSO with Google but this does not work well in Canvas. In order to operate within the shell, Canvas puts web apps in an iframe (BB does this as well). Google SSO does not support Oauth with iframes and will not allow initial authentication/ account creation through the iframe. After a user has created the account, they can log in with Google but they have to create the account by being taken out of the shell. This is something we would like to avoid. Is there a way to have SSO with Canvas (through ClassLInk, SAML, Google, etc) provide the credentials to web apps so that they can be automatically logged in? I'm wondering if user information from the API can be utilized by a web app to create login.

[matthew_buckett]

If your web app is being used from within Canvas the most elegant way to support this by adding support for Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) 1.3, this allows Canvas to securely pass across the user details so that the user doesn't have to login again. The developer level documentation on LTI is here: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.tools_intro.html

There are lots of existing tools that support the LTI standard to integrate into learning management platforms like Canvas, Moodle, Sakai, BB, D2L and more. So supporting LTI means that your tool should be able to integrate into all of them without any extra work for each platform.

[sendres]

@matthew_buckett has this right. LTI 1.3 is the way to go.