Script - Create Quizzes for your course

s530670 · ‎05-05-2018

Problem Statement:

If an instructor wants to create the quizzes for his course, he need follow a set of steps and need to to do it manually. If an instructor has set of rules designed for the quizzes, he/she can replicate the same quizzes for other courses.

Proposed Solution:

Need to design a script which first fetches all the courses available. Once we have a list of courses, will ask for specific course for which an instructor is interested to create a quiz. After making the selection for a respective course, other part scripts will create a quiz with the predefined set of rules.

Script Description:

First, take the user's input such as course name and the quiz details like quiz name, description, type, the time limit
Fetch all the courses belongs to the respective instructor with the help of course API (<canvas_url>/api/v1/accounts/self/course)
Filter the courses based on the user provided course name
If we found the courses for the user's specified requirement make a call to create the quizzes
It will take the quiz details and make a post call to create the quizzes (/api/v1/courses/:course_id/quizzes)
Notify based on the response to the user.

Code Snippet:

#Libraries to be import
require 'typhoeus'
require 'link_header'
require 'json'

canvas_url = '' # put full canvas test url eg: https://school.test.instructure.com
canvas_token = '' # put canvas API token here
api_endpoint = '/api/v1/accounts/self/courses'

#User inputs to create the quiz
course_name = "GENERAL ZOOLOGY LAB"
quizz_detail = {
        "title" => "Test Quizz3",
        "description" => "Test Desc3",
        "type" => "practice_quiz",
        "time_limit" => 160
}


#Function to create the quizzes
def createQuizzes(canvas_url,canvas_token,course,quizz_detail)
    
    api_endpoint2 = 'api/v1/courses'
    id = course["id"]
    request_url2 = "#{canvas_url}#{api_endpoint2}/#{id}/quizzes"
    
    create_quizz = Typhoeus::Request.new(
        request_url2,    #we need a variable here because we need the api url to change
        method: :post,
        headers: { authorization: "Bearer #{canvas_token}"},
        params: {
            "quiz[title]" => quizz_detail["title"],
            "quiz[description]" => quizz_detail["description"],
            "quiz[quiz_type]" => quizz_detail["type"],
            "quiz[time_limit]" => quizz_detail["time_limit"] 
        })

    create_quizz.on_complete do |response|
        if response.code == 200
           puts "Quizz created successfully for Course id #{id}"
        else
            puts "Something went wrong! Response code was #{response.code}"
        end
    end

    create_quizz.run
end
#End create quizz function


#Variables initialisation
request_url = "#{canvas_url}#{api_endpoint}"
count = 0
more_data = true
course_found = false

while more_data   # while more_data is true to keep looping through the data

    #puts request_url #helps demonstrate pagination
    get_courses = Typhoeus::Request.new(
        request_url,    #we need a variable here because we need the api url to change
        method: :get,
        headers: { authorization: "Bearer #{canvas_token}" }
        )
    get_courses.on_complete do |response|
        #get next link
            links = LinkHeader.parse(response.headers['link']).links
            next_link = links.find { |link| link['rel'] == 'next' } 
            request_url = next_link.href if next_link 
            if next_link && "#{response.body}" != "[]"
                more_data = true
            else
                more_data = false
            end
        #ends next link code
        if response.code == 200
            data = JSON.parse(response.body)
            data.each do |courses|
                count += 1
                if courses['name'] == course_name
                    more_data = false
                    course_found = true
                    createQuizzes(canvas_url,canvas_token,courses,quizz_detail)
                end
            end
        else
            puts "Something went wrong! Response code was #{response.code}"
        end
    end
    get_courses.run
end

#If no course for user provided input 
if !course_found
    puts "Course not found"
end

puts "Script done running"

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