Using External Tools - LTI outside of Modules or Assignments

[dcasady1]

We have an External Tool which has a very basic LTI. i.e. no way to edit it or add custom parameters to pass to it etc. It basically just pulls the users email address, matches it to an account on their end to verify it's from a licensed customer, authenticates them on their end and loads the URL of their materials.  The problem is that it only shows up as an External Tool in Modules/Assignments.  There is no way to access it from any other area of Canvas such as the Account menus or Course navigation. i.e. it can't be added as a side menu navigation link, can't be linked in the Help area, etc.  We also need to restrict it's use to Faculty and Staff as it is for Fac/Staff training.  In our previous LMS we could insert the LTI modules anywhere, so it was easy to create a common "Help" page accessible only to Fac/Staff and put it there. This has eluded me in Canvas.  The Canvas "Redirect Tool" app doesn't work as it is just a URL link and doesn't pull, and pass, the parameters through the LTI, so takes users to a "create a new account" page on the remote site instead of auto-authenticating them. I tried copying the HTML "Form" code from a page created through Modules, but it was linked to that specific course, module and user so failed when put into a generic Page. Does anyone have any solutions for using an External Tool outside of a Module/Assignment, such as in the Help area?

[Oliver69]

Check this out, this might help : https://support.google.com/edu/assignments/thread/37582743/canvas-lti-external-tool?hl=en/EmployeeConnection.net Insite

[matthew_buckett]

I'm guessing this is a LTI 1.1 tool, if it is you can use the XML config builder on: https://www.edu-apps.org/build_xml.html to generate some XML to use to configure your tool in Canvas. The key thing that you're needing it what's listed on this page as "Extensions". This allows you to select in which parts of Canvas your LTI tool appears. There's also some documentation (examples really) on the underlying XML in the Instructure documentation: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.tools_xml.html

If it's a LTI 1.3 tool then when configuring the Developer Key you can select the placements (but it doesn't sound like this is the case).