Hide Settings from Account Navigation

[epulham]

We are starting to get our LMS integrated with our homegrown SIS and I need a way to hide students' ability to change their password or their student name (I have no issue with them changing the Canvas Display Name, and would like to let them still change this if needed). I feel like the easiest way to do this is with CSS or JS, but I've had no luck. Would it be better to try to hide the Settings navigating from Account Navigation entirely? We already don't let our users add an extra contact email, and going forward students and teachers will all use school provided emails.

I saw that there is JS to remove "Forgot Password" -- but I already have a fix to re-route to a web page with instructions rather than default to change password  (thanks to this thread: Remove or change "Forgot Password" Link by @Tim Maw )

[robotcars]

Tagging Canvas Admins‌ Canvas Developers‌

JS or CSS might do this easily.

Are we sure this isn't an Admin Setting?

To disable user ability to change passwords and name?

cc: @CanvasDocTeam ‌

If it's not, can you clarify that you want to remove the Settings link from the User Profile tray in the Global Navigation... not the Settings page found in Accounts? (Account Navigation is the Admin Tray)

What about the other features on the page not password and delete my account related?

Do you want to limit this to specific roles, like students, so employees can edit their name and password?

[epulham]

Yes, Robert, this is to take out the Settings link that is under User Profile tray in Global Nav. 

This really does seem like a feature that should be available to Admins without writing code.  We 

Yes, we'd want this to just limit students for now, but employees could edit things. We are eventually headed to single sign on, which will simplify things. 

[James]

 @epulham ,

Robert steered you in the right direction. To answer his question for clarification, I think Emily is talking about the "Account > Settings", which is for the user, not the "Admin > Settings", which is only for admins.

I'm not sure because we do not have a "change password" option from Account > Settings. There is a note in How do I change my login password as a student?  that says "If you do not have access to change your password, your password is controlled through your institution. Contact your institution to learn how to change your password."

Our institution is one that does not allow students to change their passwords, but it's been almost 8 years since we set it up and I don't remember how we did it. Perhaps it's because we're using a single sign on (SSO)?

Maybe it's because our users are created via SIS import. I just acted as a user that was not created via a SIS import and I now have the checkbox to change password. That was a lot of work to find that.

Looking at the HTML that is there can help figure out the CSS to hide it.

<tr class="edit_data_row select_change_password_row" style="">
  <th scope="row">Password:</th>
  <td><label for="change_password_checkbox" class="checkbox"><input type="checkbox" id="change_password_checkbox" name="pseudonym[change_password]" value="1">Change Password</label></td>
</tr>‍‍‍‍

If you scan farther up, you can get some selectors to help make sure it's unique. I tend to be overly specific when I select items. I came up with this one. I tested it from the console, but CSS doesn't suffer from the same "it's not there when the CSS runs" that JavaScript does, so you should be able to add this to your global CSS for the theme.

form#update_profile_form tr.select_change_password_row { display: none; }

That will remove it for everyone, including admins, instructors, and students. That's what it sounds like you want. There are a couple of other lengthy threads here in the Community about how to make something run specifically for a user role (it should be avoided if possible).

There is already an option on the Admin > Settings page for "Users can edit their name." Leave it unchecked to disable this option. This is option 3 in the "View Features" section about half-way through this lesson in the Canvas Admin Guide: How do I set details for an account? 

We use a single sign on solution and our students never see the default Canvas page that has the password change option on it. From my testing above, this appears to be because of using a CSV import of the SIS accounts that include a password when I do it. The password I send to Canvas is not used because we have an external provider, but it seems to disable the ability to change the password (again, it's been almost 8 years since I set it up). The students could bypass the SSO login and use the Canvas login, except that the password I send is some very long random string of characters including upper case, lower case, digits, and special symbols and I don't save it anywhere to recover it.

According to the documentation, "Currently supported integrations include Facebook, Github, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Apps, Microsoft (Office 365), Clever, CAS, LDAP, OpenID, and SAML." See the Canvas Admin Guide - Table of Contents section on Authentication for more information as this might be a viable alternative to removing it via JavaScript or CSS.

There is also a Forgot Password URL under the Admin > Authentication that might be able to help with the redirect to a different page.

[epulham]

Thank you so much James. 

I will need to talk to some of our SIS programmers about whether we are going to start using SIS imports for students going forward (thereby removing the issue completely), but for students who were created manually in the system (which has been our process since about 2015), looks like these code snippets will help us limit permissions in the meantime. 

I'll report back in detail how it works.