Hide/Remove External Tool from Assignments Area

[cbishop6]

Hi, 

Is there a way to hide or remove an external tool from External Tools list in the assignments area? Our tool doesn't currently have an integration with the assignments area, so we'd like for it not to be an option in the assignments area if possible. 

Thanks so much!

Carrie Bishop

[Chris_Hofer]

Good evening, @cbishop6 ...

Is the LTI external tool something that has been developed internally at your school?  Or, is the LTI something that you have purchased from a third-party vendor?  I believe that the locations (placements) of where the LTI is available in a Canvas course are ultimately the decision of the developer ... not the end user.  So, I would recommend that you reach out directly to the developer of the app to inquire about the placements of where the LTI is accessible within a course.

I hope this will help a bit.  Sing out if you have any other questions...thanks!  Stay safe...be well.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @cbishop6 ,

Actually you can do this by using the API to set the not_selectable option of your LTI to true.  See External Tools - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation (instructure.com) for more info.  I've recently done this for quite a few LTIs on our instance to try to clean up that assignments list.  I made a python script to assist and take out some of the complexity of the API for this if you're interested (definitely use at your own risk though).  You will have to be an account admin to do this.

-Chris

[PBaumgaertner]

One thing I just discovered, is that you can click on the checkmark listed in the placements to disable a placement. It wasn't obvious to me that was a clickable element. That can be very handy for an end user to disable any particular placements that they don't wish to see (like Assignment and Link Selection)

Based on a typical Canvas install, it seems most devs don't disable this, so the Assignments external link look up is usually VERY full. You could clean this up by going through the Apps list and disable all Assignment and Link Selection placements by clicking the checkbox and saving for each one. Sounds like it's similar to what @chriscas was doing through the API.

If you ARE an external tool developer, you likely would want to configure your XML code to include

<lticm:property name="not_selectable">True</lticm:property>

at the same XML level as the "privacy_level".

That will disable that from showing up in Assignment and Link Selection by default when creating the LTI.