Editing LTI substitution strings?

[jesse_fuhrman]

I'm looking to add a custom parameter to my institution's Piazza LTI integration. We're moving from another LMS to Canvas and we're trying to make sure we get as much of the same functionality as we were able to before. With the integration in our previous LMS, we were able to remove the last three characters from what would be comparable to the CourseSection.sourcedId substitution, so that all instances of the same course in a given term would go to the same course in Piazza, i.e. we were able to remove the identification of a given instance of a course such that 20/SU-COMP-111-Y1WW, 20/SU-COMP-111-Y2WW, and 20/SU-COMP-111-Y1FF all ended up in the same Piazza class (as the field would be 20/SU-COMP-111-Y for each course). Does anyone know if it is possible to do something like this?

[jwadec]

Hi, Jesse!

If you used a blueprint course template, you could create an assignment with a specific name and then use $Canvas.assignment.title as the variable that you check against. You'd want to lock the assignment so folks cannot edit the title. You'd then associate the blueprint with all the sections. You can do this in the SIS import feed automatically.

Another option that might work depending on your naming conventions would be to use the course code/short name field. Canvas references this as $com.instructure.contextLabel.

If you'd like to look under the hood, here are all the options available for custom launch parameters ~ canvas-lms/variable_expander.rb at stable · instructure/canvas-lms · GitHub