Bug - "Assign To" Times changing when saving. "Due Date" defaults to course default time, "Available From" defaults to 12:00 AM.

[jmohr1]

The changes to the "Assign To" options for assignments has resulted in some unwanted behavior when assigning times to assignment. The "Time" boxes frequently ignore my time suggestions and need to be fixed despite seemingly correct settings.

I make the following "Assign To" settings:

Looks good! I hit save, but this is what I get when I reload the page (my default course time is 8:00 AM):

Note that the Due Date and Available from times changed. With no visual indication that this was going to happen!

I think this is due to how I assign due dates. I have a LOT of these manual assignments to make and track, so to organize this,  I have a spreadsheet that generates text that I copy-paste into the date slot. This worked fine in the previous implementation of the assignment functionality, it visually works here, but clearly it does not actually work.

In this case, I pasted in the following text in the calendar windows and hitting enter after each paste:

• Due Date: Sep 18, 2024, 5:00 PM
• Available From: Sep 18, 2024, 1:55 PM
• Until: Sep 18, 2024, 5:00 PM

This seems to correctly transfer the time to the next column. For the "Until" column, I then manually edit the time column to 5:30 PM. Note that this is the only time that correctly saved.

If I go in and manually insert the times using the calendar and dropdown menus, they will successfully save the first time. This is quite frustrating to do for large numbers of students with different accommodations.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @jmohr1,

I would encourage you to report this issue to Canvas support so they can verify it, create an official bug report, and then add it to the queue to be fixed.  I have seen a known issue with setting times on the bulk date edit screen, but I'm not sure if this is related or not. The Instructure community here is great for users to get advice from other users, but it's unfortunately not an official place to submit bugs.

I hope this info helps!

-Chris

[jmohr1]

You raise a good point that I can escalate this to my institution's support team. It could be something on our end that we can fix. I have tested this on a Mac and PC and both demonstrate this behavior, but both were also done using Chrome with the same Google profile, so the actual browsing environment could be the problem. I'll look into that.

As for reporting the issue to Canvas support... Unfortunately my institution does not have the "Report a Problem" link enabled that is detailed in the article you referenced. The article then goes on to say in that case, post it to the Canvas community.