Adding more than one Placement of same type within a single Developer Key

[skemsley]

Hello,

We are an LTI tool provider and are trying to determine whether we can create multiple placements of the same type within a single developer key.

For instance, can I create two "Course Navigation" placements, each with a unique title and Target Link URl? If not, is there any other way besides creating another developer key to accommodate the second "Course Navigation" placement?

It seems that you can only add one of each type of placement within a single developer key, but I wanted to confirm that this is the case before abandoning the idea as the alternative is quite laborious.

Thank you in advance!

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @skemsley 

I suspect that is a limitation of the LTI 1.3 spec itself, rather than Canvas, but I cannot confirm that.

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

Hi @skemsley 

I suspect that is a limitation of the LTI 1.3 spec itself, rather than Canvas, but I cannot confirm that.

[skemsley]

@mzimmerman Thanks for the reply!

I am not convinced this is a limitation of the LTI 1.3 spec. 

First, I believe the definition of these placement types is done by Canvas, since they are specific to the Canvas UI. Second, I have been able to create what are essentially duplicate placements in Blackboard (same placement type, where only the Target Link URl differs). 

I'm guessing this is a minor use case for most LTI app developers and that's why Canvas doesn't support it. Unless there is a workaround?

Thanks again for any insight anyone has.

[mzimmerman · Accepted solution]

@skemsley You may be right.  I was only guessing it was an LTI 1.3 limitation because there is only one place to enable the placement when setting up the developer key.

[ColtonSwapp]

Hello @skemsley 

I was just curious what LTI tool you were trying to do this with? 

I think that @mzimmerman is correct, in that there is only one place to enable the placement when setting up the dev key, but I would love to try and verify. You might need to set up another developer key to accommodate the second "Course Navigation" placement, depending on the application and they way it is configured for use in Canvas. 

One other curious question I had was, why did you want to add two of the same course nav links for the LTI? Was one of them going to be used for certain roles such as students, while the other will be restricted for only the instructor/TA role? 

[MattEdmonds]

Hi Colton,
I know this is a months-old thread, but I came across it looking to do a couple of things with this functionality. I work with CompTIA, and our tools offer links out to multiple courses based on custom_fields in the LTI launch. So theoretically we could do the following with one Dev key:
-Multiple of any type of placement (one for each course we offer), changing the custom fields within each duplicate placement so that each points to a different course, but operates through a single tool
-As you mentioned, having separate placements for our instructor reporting dash and our learning tools.
So if a customer wants access to our courses for Network+, Security+, and Project+ for example, we would have four Link Selection placements: one that deep links to the content selector for that course, and one Resource Link that sends instructors to the reporting dash. Alternatively, as you said, course nav placements, one that goes to the dashboard for the learner course, and one that goes to the instructor reporting dash.