Admin: Course Name/Course Code fields need to be wider

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As Admin, I modify settings all the time. Some of the fields for these settings are so short that I can hardly see what I'm writing! I would really like to see the field sizes of the Course Name & Course code in the course settings increase, for example. These only show 23 & 15 chars, and most of our names & codes are at least twice that length as they have the term, delivery method, course name & the crn. Just a suggestion to increase some of these short fields into something longer, as it doesn't hurt anything if they are longer than what we admin's need, but it does lend itself to mistakes when we can't see the full text of what we are typing. Thanks...

9 Comments
James
Community Champion

@cbirdsong 

Your course codes sound more like a SIS codes than the human-friendly course code. Still, Canvas doesn't always show what you need it to show, so we've resorted to some hackery in the names as well. Thankfully, Canvas allows nicknames so that users can change the course code into something that is meaningful for them.

Canvas typically uses short course names and course codes throughout their examples. They may not want people to see the whole thing because they want to encourage people to keep it short.

Luckily, changing these two things is relatively easy for someone with admin access to Canvas.

You can modify this yourself using custom CSS applied through your theme editor. You can change the width to be what you would like, but the important thing is literally the !important. The width is hard-coded in the inline CSS so you need to override it. Both inline-styles and !important are considered bad-form, but in this case, you need to overrule one evil with another.

body.settings input#course_name { width: 30em !important; }
body.settings input#course_course_code { width: 30em !important; }

I've added the body.settings selector to make sure that it only runs on the course selector page. It may be possible that the only place an input#course_course_code appears in Canvas is on the settings page, but I didn't double check.

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Moderating
 
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Thanks to @James for providing a custom solution!

@cbirdsong We would be able to move this forward for further discussion as long as it is focused on the width of a specific field. Would you like us to edit the idea so that it is specifically requesting wider Course Name and Course Code fields in course settings (on the assumption that you won't deploy James's CSS remedy)?

cbirdsong
Community Participant

@James sounds like a good work-around for now. I hate to modify the CSS with a bunch of minor tweaks in case a major update breaks a few things, but it's a good suggestion that I may try out. And yes, the names/codes that come over are from Banner so we admins don't have control over how they name them on that end.

@Stef_retired yes, let's focus on the Course Name & Course Code fields for now. I know there are other ones but I can't recall at this time. It would be nice to have around 30 or so characters, if you need a suggested number.

James
Community Champion

@cbirdsong 

One thing that I do is to modify the CSS for myself, rather than the institution. That way, if I break something, it only breaks for me. I already have Tampermonkey installed for some of the other things I do, so I wrote a Canvas CSS Tweaks script to inject the CSS on certain pages. It could easily be modified for what you're after.

As for using the Custom CSS, the "breakage" in this case is that the width will revert back to the regular size until you find the correct selector. Then it only breaks for instructors or people accessing the course settings page. That is, major updates are only going to cause minor damage. However, if you're not using any CSS file, it does add a file to the process and it runs on every page. The script approach I mentioned will only run (in the browser) on pages that match the URL pattern and only for you.

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

@cbirdsong Edits made! Please take a moment to read through the revised title and description to confirm that they accurately describe the request.

cbirdsong
Community Participant
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