Speedgrader docviewer is not displaying plain text files

[BH6]

Has anyone else experienced an issue with the docviewer in speedgrader not being able to display plain text files (specifically .cpp files) within the last week or so. It will display files with a .txt extension but it doesn't seem to display any other plain text files.

The behavior that I am seeing is similar to the issue that was occurring back in February earlier this year.

I am running on the latest version of Mac OSX using the latest Google Chrome. I am experiencing the problem in Firefox and Safari as well.

I have a workaround for this problem but it is annoying. This problem requires me to download all submissions, combine each student's files into a PDF, annotate the PDF using Adobe Acrobat, and lastly upload the annotated PDF back to Canvas in a comment.

Becky Hester

[Chris_Hofer]

Good evening, @BH6 ...

*.cpp files are not listed as being viewable within the DocViewer of SpeedGrader.  Please see the following documents which should help to clarify which documents can be viewed in the SpeedGrader:

• How do I use SpeedGrader? - Instructure Community - 757 (canvaslms.com)
• How do I add annotated comments in student submiss... - Instructure Community - 694 (canvaslms.com)
• What types of files can be previewed in Canvas? - Instructure Community - 607 (canvaslms.com)

I hope the information provided here will be helpful to you in some way.

[BH6]

I understand that but I have been annotating plain text source code files (.cpp, .h, etc.) for the past several years and what I am experiencing is a change in behavior.

There was a similar problem earlier this year but Canvas fixed it. Now it seems to be broken again.

[emlarson · Accepted solution]

You're not alone in this problem, @BH6  - we had the same issue reappear last week (for *.c files in our case) after February's problems; we managed to get last week's case escalated to L2, someone there re-rendered the submissions, everything worked great again, and then the problem reappeared today.

The consistent response we've been getting through support channels is "that file format isn't supported" without anyone realizing that the extension is cosmetic and doesn't control the file format. These are simply "text files by a different name."  But in order to get good attention to the text file rendering problem, it needs to end in ".txt" right now.

Since I don't know of any way to report on who's using the "accept text file uploads" feature, my next step is going to have to be posting a system-wide announcement telling instructors to make their students name their text files ".txt" and I'm dreading the fallout from faculty inevitably saying, "okay, they named their submission term-paper.docx.txt and now I can't open it..."

(All that said, I'm also concerned that this isn't really a problem of "text files not rendering properly if they don't end in .TXT" but instead an issue of "text files not rendering properly, period" and it's simply that the faculty with the strongest investment in that feature happen to be using it for text files that don't naturally save as *.txt?)