Canvas Inbox Refactor Update_ 1/25/2023

JDPearson · ‎01-25-2023

Blog Headers -- 2000 x 200 (4).png

Good afternoon, as many of you may have already noticed the Inbox Refactor move to production has been rolled back. We experienced some issues that were unfortunately only discoverable in production and are now working to address them. Once the fixes are in place and we've determined the code is performing satisfactorily, we will then move the Refactor to production again, at a date TBD.

As always, thank you for your interest in Canvas, in Inbox, your dedication to your students and for being a valued member of our Community.

dbrace · ‎01-31-2023

Would it be possible to know what the issues were in production?

JDPearson · ‎02-10-2023

@dbrace The code was rolled back due to slow response times being experienced by some users.

Our "challenge" with Inbox is that with it having been in use for such a long time, there are 10+ years worth of customer's messages that have varied styling, texts, formats, etc. We have internally created Beta tests to cover as many use cases/scenarios that we can think of, however we are unable to capture them all. Therefore when we go to Production there's the potential a new issue might arise and that is impacting response time for some users.

We are currently working on fixes for the recently discovered issues and will work with one of our larger/older users, who experienced most of the reported issues, to do some testing in their Prod environment before re-releasing to Prod for everyone.

Thanks.

dbrace · ‎02-10-2023

Thank you for sharing that, @JDPearson.

The reason I asked is because if we in the Community do not know (even at a high level) what a problem is, we are not able to report whether it is still happening to us when it is eventually rolled out it can be helpful to know a more than what was said in the initial post.

One thing that I do find interesting with your response is how you said "varied styling, texts, formats, etc.". I find this interesting because one of the critiques of the Canvas Inbox is that it is only a plain-text format messaging platform and does not support rich-text formatting.

Without going into too much detail, can you explain what you mean by that?

JDPearson · ‎02-10-2023

@dbrace Thank you for the feedback. I do hope that you and others in the community would report any and all issues that you might experience, even without awareness of specific problems, so that they might be addressed.

Regarding the detail, it was not rich-text formatting related. There were issues experienced with line breaks, some unicode strings and clickable URLs.