Code file types no longer showing in Speedgrader

[AdamHyatt]

Code file types are not showing in Speedgrader again. I have tested this out with .pyt and .java file types. This happened around February 20th of this year and a fix was pushed but it is happening again. The toolbar in the doc viewer shows up but the body of the doc does not. 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @AdamHyatt,

Have you reported this to Canvas support yet?  For an issue like this, that's going to be the fastest path for resolution.  I'd encourage anyone else experiencing this problem to do the same so that Instructure can get a sense of the scale of the issue, which helps prioritize work to fix it.

Hope this advice helps a bit!

-Chris

[AdamHyatt]

Hi Chris,

Yes, I put in a ticket right before I submitted this post. 

[marjeta]

I had a long chat with customer support yesterday. They suggested I submit an "idea". However, there are several "ideas" related to that. The representative sent my request to the next level.

Later I got contacted by a Level 2 tech support, who suggested I ask students to rename their submissions as .txt - which is completely unacceptable. A big part of programming instruction is to teach students to use correct file extension!

[AdamHyatt]

I received a message from Canvas Support and they said that they are aware that this is an issue and are actively trying to resolve it. 

[marjeta]

Not very actively... People have been complaining about this for over a year. There's an "idea" from August last year - it's labelled as "new", which means nobody ever worked on it. 

It's not possible to comment on an "idea" directly. But if you submit a new one with similar content, they will add merge them, like they did with the one I submitted yesterday.

[chriscas]

Hi @marjeta,

Thanks for calling out the idea.  As a Canvas admin (and former computer science student way back in the day), this one is important to me too, and somewhat frustrating that the issue still seems to exist at least for some people.  Since the idea is still in the New status right now, it would probably be beneficial for anyone experiencing this issue to have your school/institution Canvas admins bring up this specific idea with your Instructure Customer Success Managers, as that might get some more action (especially if a bunch of us do this).  I will probably be doing this myself on behalf of my institution.

This used to work fine, even if it was never intended to, so it certainly seems like something that should be relatively easy to make work again...  I say that carefully though because I know that things that can appear to be "easy" to fix can be much more complex in the code.

I hope this helps!

-Chris

[marjeta]

A problem I see - when trying to submit an "idea", it says to check if someone else already submitted it. But then, they don't give us an option to like, vote, or comment that we are affected with the same issue. So, they have no idea how many people are affected by this.

[ebonakdarian]

Clearly not a priority for them, it's October 2025 and I'm having this issue (again) 😕 Makes the SpeedGrader totally worthless if I can't see the code submissions, in my case .java files.