Is there a way to download Canvas Inbox/Communications?

[JDW223]

Hi,Community--

I need to download the "Communications" content (i.e. Inbox messages) between two users in a course - see Capture.JPG att'd. Does anyone know of a way to perform this from an "Admin" role on the front end? What about from the backend that will produce a useable file (not the API-generated JSON)?

Any information and help will be appreciated!

Thank you,

 @JDW223 ‌

Tagging my colleague:  @cjacobs ‌

[JDW223]

stefaniesanders‌ - any chance you have a BP for this?

[Stef_retired]

 @JDW223 , downloading conversations/messages is not something I ever needed to do; perhaps a search through answered questions will bring you closer to a solution. In the meantime, I've shared your question with the Canvas Admins‌ and Canvas Developers‌ groups to get additional eyes on it.

[JDW223]

Thank you, stefaniesanders. We found a 2018 Q&A thread on the topic, but no answer described a BP with usable data. I'll keep track in the groups you tagged. - Jeanna

[JDW223]

We found the content in "Admin Tools" > "View Notifications". I've added the Idea: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/16565-admin-tools-exporting-view-notifications to open discussion on adding an export feature. Thanks, all. - Jeanna

[tami]

That is for Notifications.  I have not seen how to download messages/conversations.

[cjacobs]

 @JDW223 ‌ Thanks for including me!  

[James]

The JSON that comes from the API is usable, it's just not human-friendly. It is much more usable than a text dump of the comments that you would then have to go through and parse to extract specific information.

Canvas leaves the formatting up to us. How you want it to look is probably not how I want it to look. For example, you may want it in a printout that looks like an email thread with subject line, from, to, and message. I may want it in an Excel spreadsheet so I can sort it by date or quickly count the number of messages or make a graph of how spread out they were.

JSON is all you're going to get through the API as the API is meant for computers to understand. The Canvas Admin reports generate CSV files, but those aren't directly usable. Canvas Data provides the information in a database format that you can query against. All of these require you to manipulate it to make it human friendly.

Thankfully, JSON is well supported. Recent versions of Excel can work with JSON files although I find it easier to go ahead and convert it to CSV or native Excel format first. There are a lot converters already written to convert JSON into another format. I've seen online converters for JSON to Excel, PDF, CSV, HTML, Word, and other formats. None of them are going to give you exactly what you want because it includes the field names and those have no inherent order like an email header (your email client decides what order to put the headers in when it shows them to you).

Getting it into Excel and then doing a mail merge with Word can get you a structured human-friendly document without having to write a program.

The problem there is scale. That works well for one or two pairings, but if you're going to have to do this a lot, then something (a program) to automatically download the conversations and prepare them in the format you want can save a lot of time.

Your screen appears to be from the old analytics -- it's been a while since I used the old analytics. Did it show the actual conversation or just the number of interactions?

The list conversations endpoint allows you to filter so you can get the messages to just a specific person. You would have to masquerade as one of the users.

There is also a List of CommMessages for a user endpoint that accesses the messages (emails, sms, twitter, etc) that have been sent to a user, but you would have to go through and check who the sender was when you were looking for a conversation between users (that's part of why JSON is useful). If a student had all external communications turned off, that might not be helpful. I haven't looked at it that much.

[JDW223]

 @cjacobs ‌ - see James's reply. 

[JDW223]

 @James  Thank You  Unfortunately, the analytics version we have is only showing the number of interactions. I copied my colleague above, so we can discuss a new version, and she's more versed in the API - JSON - CSV realm of pulling the info and making it look human-friendly, haha. I hope we can find a solution to make it look more like the "email" format you describe above. Again, thank you!

[James]

 @JDW223  

The New Analytics just shows the counts as well. Don't make a rush to switch to it just for that.  Generally, I find it less helpful than the old one, although it does have the ability to show which students have not viewed content and that was previously only available through the access report, which is one student at a time.

I was hoping that the old analytics might have shown the messages when you moused over it and that would give a shortcut way and getting the information. I didn't think it did, but I didn't have a way to test anymore.

[JDW223]

They do not

[mahdimn]

Hi,

Where can I get this piece of code from? Are there any further documentation on how to use the API?

Thank you.

[tami]

I must say, I object to the notation, "No one else has this question" because I've had that question for a long time, and I expect other people do too.  Plus, unless, I mis-understood the question, it seems like lots of people have been asking essentially the same question online for years.

• Printing a string of email messages from Canvas  (12/10/2017)
• Printing a string of email messages from Canvas (2/13/2018)
• Is it possible to download Canvas Mail contents?  (6/16/2018)
• https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/2071  (5/30/2015)

[Stef_retired]

 @tami ‌, the notation "No one else has this question" is a member-driven message that was generated automatically by the software after no one clicked on "I also have this question" that displayed before the question received responses.

 How we keep your questions flowing! goes into detail about how Q&A is facilitated in this forum.

Thanks for providing the links to other questions associated with this!

[tami]

Hi Stefanie.  Thank you for the explanation of "No one else has this question."  How long does a question sit before that "I also have this question" goes away?  I clicked on the link you provided but did not find anything explaining the "I also have this question" button.

Another Matter:

On that page https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/community/blog/2019/10/08/how-we-keep-your-questions-flowing , I found the categories of "Assumed Answered" interesting. 

• It would be extremely helpful if those 3 categories could be indicated in the "Assumed Answered" flag at the top. (Are they indicated already and I missed seeing that?)
• If it is Case #3 (There is no answer), and that was clearly marked at the top of the page, then no one need take the time to sift through all the back-and-forth replies to try to find the "assumed answer."
• Case #2 (Multiple correct answers) is quite different from Case #3! -- If it is Case #2, it would be very helpful to know that there are multiple correct answers -- someone might just read far enough to get one answer (then stop reading), when another answer might be more useful to that person.
• Better yet, if the flagger who tags the "Assumed Answered" could highlight where the answer(s) is(are), it would really save people from needing to sort through all of the other messages (which are, at times, tangential, or related musings/commiserations).

Thank you again,

Tami

[Stef_retired]

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and helpful feedback! The Canvas Community will soon be moving to a different platform—you can read all about that in Canvas Community is Moving (Going Places).—and even though the UI and feature set will be different from what you see here, we'll definitely keep this in mind as we move forward.

[JDW223]

 @tami  Thank You for providing those links; I'm reading through those threads, now. Side note: I hesitate to reply to questions that are more than 2 years old. I fear they get lost in the shuffle. 

[mahdimn]

It is surprising how ignorant the Canvas development team have been in the past few years to such a simple request. It essentially shouldn't take a developer in the team more than a couple of days to come up with this feature, but they still refuse to put it in the backlog.

[Chris_Hofer]

@mahdimn ...

I understand the frustration...I've been there, too.  I've wanted things developed that I thought were great idea, and I'm still waiting years later.  I've also had some of my own ideas implemented by Instructure that I thought would never get developed (there just wasn't support from other Community members).  But, for whatever reason, they decided to implement it.  It sure would be nice if Instructure had all the resources in the world to develop everything we want, but that's just not reality.  I would like to direct you to What is the feature development process for Instru... - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com).  Specifically, check out the section on "If my idea doesn't align with a priority, is it still important?".  What you and I might think is a simple fix or implementation...well, it might be just the opposite of that.  The document I linked to explains more about that.

Not sure if this will help or not, but thought I'd provide that resource and some of my own personal experiences...for what it's worth.  Take care, and be well.