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cesbrandt · ‎04-28-2023

Problem statement: The problem is fairly simple, some of the default icons provided by Instructure can be...confusing. Two "key" examples are the joint usage of the link icon for both external URLs and external tools and the rocket ship used for quizzes. The first one is pretty obvious from the perspective of support/admins, but not so obvious from a user perspective. To a user, external tools and external URLs have identical functionality. They either embed another webpage into Canvas or they launch it in a new tab/window. There's no thought given to how that third-party system knows who the user is, just that they got what they needed to get. From the support/admins perspective, there is a clear difference in functionality to consider when troubleshooting. The editor is identical between them, so unless they hover over the icon or go into the activity to identify the activity type before editing, they wouldn't know. However, it can impact the user. If a user see two different icons that normally behave similarly, they can start to question it. Why are the icons different? What is different between them? This can then lead to a better understanding for them when they have issues to bring to support. The second example is kinda self-explanatory: why would you use a rocket ship to designate a quiz!? Here's the kicker, this isn't hard to change with the global CSS, so why ask for this? Simple, any change to the Instructure-Icons font changes the codepoint for every icon after the added/removed icon. What does this mean? For example, on 2022-09-11 the `rubricdark` icon used codepoints $EB0D-$EB0E, on 2023-01-19 it used $EB0E-$EB0F, and currently it uses $EB0F-$EB10. The icon didn't change, but the codepoint used to display it did. Easy for Instructure to update their CSS since it all gets compiled together, but institution-loaded CSS/JS doesn't. I know what you're thinking, 3 updates in 6-months, how is that a problem? Well, it isn't so much a problem as it is an annoyance. Font changes aren't announced, they just happen. Additionally, unless the change is due to a feature change that's in Beta for a bit, the font changes aren't always reflected in the Beta when testing for continued compatibility of custom CSS/JS for upcoming updates. If an institution wants to customize their instance a little more than currently available, they have to pay close attention to production releases to stay on top of unannounced changes like those to the font. Proposed solution: Instead of simply changing the icons, why not make it so institutions can customize them to their own preferences in a user-friendly way? Is it overkill for such a minor thing? Yes, but is it wrong to offer more customization options? I'm not suggesting that it needs to be anything overly elaborate, but the ability to pick an icon to apply to all instances of said icon would be a bare minimum for it. A "like" would be the ability to provide custom icons. Instructure has already implemented an icon maker in the RCE, why not allow us to specify them globally? Maybe allow for the selection of icons from open-source icon sets that don't have licensing issues. Perhaps even uploading custom fonts, in case the institution has their own custom icons already compiled. User role(s): admin,instructor,student,ta,designer,observer

cesbrandt · ‎09-07-2022

Just my own 2 cents, in case you hadn't noticed it, but Studio assigned admin to all users with a Canvas account-level role, regardless of the roles permissions. While I think more diverse roles in Studio is needed, it'd be nice to be able to have them assigned separately from just having a role in Canvas.

cesbrandt · ‎03-10-2022

@Ron_Bowman, I think I got it. The issue only occurred if you toggled the Ace editor on immediately after switching to the raw editor from the RCE. If you toggled the CodeMirror editor at all before the Ace editor has to load, it wouldn't occur. The issue turned out to be a placement issue. I had placed the event listener for the CodeMirror toggle to load every time the Ace editor was enabled/disabled, regardless of the currently visible editor. This was causing multiple event listeners to be loaded to the toggle, firing the initAce function twice. Playing with it, I got it to fire up to 6 times with a single click before I figured out placement issue. I've updated the GitHub to v3.3, which should fix that. Please let me know if you have any further problems.

cesbrandt · ‎03-10-2022

@Ron_Bowman, could you provide some more details? I've been trying to recreate it, but I'm having no luck. With the syntax highlighter disabled when entering an edit page and the raw editor as the last used HTML editor, I'm not having any issue with following your steps. Neither Firefox nor Chrome is giving me problems. :S

cesbrandt · ‎03-09-2022

Alright, so I had no intention of returning to this userscript after Instructure released CodeMirror as their version of it. However, in the past week I've been reached out to by a dozen different people about it having recently stopped working. Well, as @Shar reported, there were 2 compatibility changes needed. One of which really shouldn't have been an issue to begin with, but I lazily had decided to utilize jQuery, which Instructure had also been using at the time that I originally wrote this. Given the unexpected popularity of the userscript, I've made a "major" update, completely stripping out the jQuery and updating the editor components to their lastest versions. Additionally, I added compatibility with Instructure's use of CodeMirror, hackish though my solution may be. As with the originally released version, this one does not replace any of the native editors from Canavs, it simply adds a new option. Considering that I rewrote it in ES6 in ~2 hours last night, I won't be surprised if I missed something, but I have tested in on multiple Canvas instances without noticing any issues. I'm not going to promise to just it up-to-date. Frankly, I don't work in the Canvas UI anywhere near what I used to. Since I'd created this to make the editor better for myself, I don't have the same level of motivation to maintain it as I used to. Having said that, if you do have problems, you're welcome to reach out to me with them. If I find I have the time, I'll do what I can to keep it up, but, again, I make no promises.

cesbrandt · ‎12-13-2021

I asked this morning and they say that a hotfix for the gradebook and LTIs has already been implemented. A more complete patch is expected for the next weekly deploy.

cesbrandt · ‎12-10-2021

No worries. It's the dev & friends chat noted on the Canvas GitHub: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki/Getting-Help There are a few Instructure employees and a few just plain Canvas administrators that hang out in it, asking questions and sharing knowledge. As for updates, I'm afraid I haven't seen anything in the chat about it since yesterday afternoon when I managed to recreate the issue on my own system. We generally only say something in there when we have something to say.

cesbrandt · ‎12-09-2021

Yes, this seems to be a fairly widespread issue, though we've yet to have any reports of it occurring in Firefox. We've been instructing our faculty to use Firefox when they encounter it. It's been a topic of discussion in the IRC chat, but the Instructure engineers were saying they've been having difficulty reproducing it in an environment they could use to troubleshoot. Having said that, we've started to get reports of identical symptoms when accessing LTIs. but we've been unable to confirm they're related. So, it's possible the problem is even more extensive than first thought. Update 2021-12-10 @ 9:15 AM ET Please be aware that, at this point, it has been confirmed that the Files area of a course can produce the same issue.

cesbrandt · ‎08-12-2021

We noticed that it also doesn't matter if you give a user Account Admin on a subaccount because, as you pointed out, SIS Data - Manage can only be assigned at root. As a "temporary" solution, I wrote a basic third-party deletion script that allows authorized users to delete any non-protected shells using a service account. I understand why they made this change, but I also feel it was a bit hasty in design. For something like this, there are always exceptions to the rule that need to be able to be accounted for. It's my hope they, at least, give us the option to either override the requirement for specific users or disable the requirement entirely.

cesbrandt · ‎07-29-2021

Comments from Instructure This was resolved as a Known Issue. ~2 updates ago the permission for delete courses with SIS data was modified to require the permission to manage SIS data. SIS data is often used as a cross-system identifier, so the ability to modify it should be heavily restricted. However, this should not prevent users from being able to do other things with a course using an SIS ID, not even deleting them. The idea is pretty straightforward: undo this change! Or, at the very least, make it a permanently optional change. Here's our situation. Imagine a student completes an LTI assignment. The instructor unknowingly modifies the SIS ID, likely through some "fat fingering" when modifying the course title or something, then requests a grade sync from the LTI. Well, the LTI sees the new SIS ID and syncs the grades that were submitted with it, giving that student a 0, instead of the 98 they actually earned. Why would this scenario even come up? Some of our faculty are actively involved in the development of curriculum, requiring they be granted a measure of access that ordinarily wouldn't be given to instructors. Due to our usage of LTIs that are dependent upon SIS IDs, we developed a third-party course copy system that will use the Canvas API to generate shells, assign SIS IDs, and do a number of other things to save us the hassle of having to do so much manually. This means that nearly all of our shells, whether they be developmental, testing, or live, have SIS IDs assigned to them. However, almost no one should be manually touching these values, let alone able to do so. Here are a few examples of circumstances where they should be allowed to delete the shells: Development of a course ran late and a live course needs to be replaced There are more complicated LTI-related reasons why we can't use the course reset function. Development of a course was dropped/drastically changed Why keep the course shell if it's gone in a different direction? Just muddies the course list. Testing of a course needs to be redone with updated course Some LTI providers charge per course, only allowing test SIS IDs to be reused, so we can't just assign new ones every time we need to restart testing. I understand that we don't operate like most institutions. In some ways we are seen are backwards while other ways are considered idealized, if not practical. I also can't imagine we're the only ones that manage our SIS IDs externally.

cesbrandt · ‎03-24-2021

This definitely has our support! It doesn't make any sense to me why this was removed to add optional overlay formatting. When we want students to go through a PowerPoint presentation, we don't want them to look at a "PDF" of the presentation, which is what happens with the preview system. Having this feature restored would be great!

cesbrandt · ‎01-20-2021

I know my version has some features that I personally think make it superior, I'm sorry to say that I have no intention of maintaining it once Instructure releases theirs. I'd rather work towards them improving theirs than having to maintain a separate one. I find it odd that their implementation of codemirror doesn't include the find/replace functionality. It's an addon, but it seems to me like it should be a no brainer to include it. I tried just injecting the plugin, but just like with the RCE (TinyMCE), they've modified it so that third-party injection of plugins is annoying. I never got my custom plugins to properly work for the RCE and it doesn't look like I'll be able to get standard plugins to work with the "Pretty HTML Editor." With regards to testing the theme selector, it seems that, because I'm keeping the repository private until I release it proper, I need to invite people to the GitHub repository. I sent you a private message about it. When the new editor releases proper, I'll make another blog post dedicated to it. Until then, it's kinda just going to leech off here, though there isn't much else to say about it. ^^'

cesbrandt · ‎01-20-2021

@Shar update the `editorLinksText` config so to remove "raw" from the first entry. It's not a problem with the script, it's a language detection issue. Instructure changed the language files to use a different string in the toggle label. It's what I warned would need to be changed whenever they pushed their update (why the Beta originally worked with my update and the Production didn't). Looks like they decided not to wait for the actual scheduled weekend update to push that bit. I don't like using the language strings for this stuff, but I learned the hard way not to trust those gibberish class names they've started putting out there. Just like the font character IDs, those class names change whenever they feel like. As for the themes...done. I could use some volunteers to test it out.

cesbrandt · ‎01-19-2021

So, it seems my update will only be useful for about a month. The new formatter Instructure is releasing does including syntax highlighting. Looks like they're going to be using react-codemirror2 for the editor. Sadly, I don't like the color scheme...guess I'll need to google some themes. 😞

cesbrandt · ‎01-19-2021

It does have colours! I don't like the colours, but they're there! Finally, my userscript will be useless! ❤️

cesbrandt · ‎01-16-2021

@dwarden, @lorewap3, and @Chris_Hofer, I've released v3.1 which strips out the old RCE support and fixes the Production environment loading. I've tested it on 3 different Instructure-hosted environments without issue. Please give it a go and let me know if you have any issues. I already fixed a bug of my original release where the RCE/HTML toggle would duplicate the Ace editor, regardless of the state, on the assignments editor. I have identified why the detection failed on Production. It was a simple matter of the Beta having a `data` attribute that wasn't on the Production instance. Accounting for that, though, I came across another problem that will require a minor update whenever they push theirs. The wording of the editor links will change, but taking that into account and the code still works on Beta. In the next few days I'll release a legacy version with the latest version of the code for the old RCE, since it, theoretically, could be used on the self-hosted instances (I've never tested nor supported this), but it will not be maintained. I'll also update this blog post with new screenshots, but that also won't be tonight.

cesbrandt · ‎01-15-2021

@MattHanes, thanks, I wasn't notified of that post despite following the idea. Looks like it might be a more complicated situation than I thought. 😞

cesbrandt · ‎01-15-2021

@Chris_Hofer, thank you for the confirmation that the issue is between the environments. Unless someone wants to volunteer to troubleshoot it for me today, I'll be able to take a look at it on Production tomorrow evening. My guess is that the editor identification methods changed. I tried to keep them as simplistic as I could, but what they were when the new RCE released was entirely broken when I pulled up the Beta yesterday. Additionally, the bottom control bar management was reworked so the custom toggle kept getting deleted when toggling between the RCE and HTML editors. I solved this by building the toggle when switching to the HTML editor and deleting it when switching to the RCE. I don't like doing it this way, but it's the only way I could make it work. The new UI doesn't offer a friendly placement to stably add the toggle like the old UI did, but this appears to be a relatively recent change as it was stable before. Hopefully, whatever difference there is will come into sync with the enforcement. If not, it may end up being updated next weekend, too. If these events are any indication, I may need to put a lot more effort into maintaining this. :S If nothing else, I'll get an update (v3) out this weekend to get it working on Production without the old RCE code. Should another update be needed next weekend, well, at least I've already written the code via the Beta instances.

cesbrandt · ‎01-15-2021

@dwarden, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm afraid that without the enforcement I'm not able to troubleshoot it. I lack the authority to turn it on the Production instances we have. ^^' @lorewap3, it's good to hear that it's working for you, at least on the Beta. Hopefully, what's on the Beta is what will be enforced, but it might not be until next weekend when the update hits. As for the resizability of the Ace editor, it's something that's been brought up before. I know it's possible to make it user resizable, but I have not had the time to revisit the request. I added the sizing variable to the configuration section as a middleground option.

cesbrandt · ‎01-15-2021

@dwarden, are you using v2.3 that I released yesterday? I just tested it from another computer and it seems to be working for me regardless of the browser. I've tested in editing/creating discussions, assignments, quizzes, pages, and the course syllabus in 3 different Instructure-hosted instances (all Beta). The visual is different due to the new UI. You won't see the toggle when you first load up the editor: The toggle will appear after you switch to the HTML Editor: If you are and it's still not working, I'm afraid that it may be a difference between Production and Beta instances, meaning I won't be able to troubleshoot it until after the enforcement.

Post Details	Date Published	Views	Likes
[Theme Editor] Globally Customize Icons Problem statement: The problem is fairly simple, some of the default icons provided by Instructure can be...confusing. Two "key" examples are the joint usage of the link icon for both external URLs ...	04-28-2023	132	0
Restore Delete Course without Manage SIS Data Requirement Comments from Instructure This was resolved as a Known Issue. ~2 updates ago the permission for delete courses with SIS data was modified to require the permission to manage SIS data. ...	07-29-2021	769	0
[Permissions] Granular Course Import/Export Permissions Scenario: It's not uncommon for faculty to try importing from their old shells and get the entire course. Then, in the process of cleaning up the mess, they delete more than they should. Not only...	09-04-2020	901	0
[Global Navigation] Course Navigation Grouping Idea So, the idea is pretty straightforward: allowing links on the course navigation to be grouped into submenus. Reason Why? Any more questions? Idea Breakdown Group...	05-04-2020	1100	3
Default Course Configuration The idea is fairly straightforward: add the ability to define a "default configuration" for all new courses. This would mean that, instead of the Canvas default settings, when a new course is create ...	04-28-2020	1309	5
HTML Editor Syntax Highlighter (Updated 2022-03-09) Original Post Disclaimer This is my second blog post to the Canvas Community, but I'm going to stick with my tl;dr format. The Situation Who doesn't like their code to be easier to...	09-11-2018	11218	20
Unable to Edit Blog I'm trying to update my blog post to reflect that it is now obsolete, but I get the error: An unexpected error has occurred. I've tried multiple browsers and multiple computers. Only thing that ha...	06-29-2018	860	3
Developer Styles @James ‌ and I kinda went of on a tangent, hijacking the Calendar Event Manager document thread (sorry about that @chadscott ‌), discussing this. Now, everyone kn...	08-10-2017	675	3
Full Course Listing with Sorting and Filtering Update 2018-07-25 I know this is late, but I was unable to edit the post to make this update. On 2018-06-23 this script became OBSOLETE due to Instructure having made their own version a non-opti...	06-09-2017	6417	17
Community Thread Layouts Is it just me, or are some threads loading with a flat layout even when the Discussion View Style is configured to load them as threaded? Is it possible to force the threaded layo...	04-24-2017	831	3
Single Thread Logout Edit: I have confirmed that this does not occur only for me. A co-worker went through the same troubleshooting I did with identical results. To ensure it isn't just something being caused by our netw...	07-14-2016	777	5
External Site Login Alright, so let me explain the scenario. I'm looking to make legitimately configured student accounts available to authorized users without needing to provide login credentials for a whole new accoun...	07-13-2016	2240	1
"Real" Student View This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas For details, please read through the Canvas Deploy Notes (2020-08-12). Okay, so the title could use some work, sorry abo...	07-12-2016	7812	25
Additional Canvas Reporting Please, know that this is not going up as an idea or question because I want to spark a discussion on this and that it would not be something for Instructure to do, unless someone really wants to ask...	07-07-2016	2024	7
API 504 Timeout Avoidance The title kinda covers the question: how can I avoid sporadic 504 errors when conducting extensive API calls? So, the basic situation is that I'm trying to generate a report of all instances of th...	07-01-2016	3512	2
API: GET lti_apps Alright, while I was working on a way to identify the origin of an external tool configuration that is linked into a course, I stumbled across an API access point that gives me exactly what I was loo...	06-15-2016	1041	1
Account Role Detection Edit (5/20/2016): Below is the code I came up with to build a global array of all Account Roles assigned to the ENV['current_user_id'] relative to the page being accessed. Rewriting this edit has ...	05-16-2016	4817	8
Truly Ungraded Assignment This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas I'm sorry for the odd title, I just can't seem to come up with a good one that describes what I'm going to be suggesting. We use "un...	04-29-2016	5666	24
New UI Dashboard Default View This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas It would be nice to be able to have some measure of control over the new UI dashboard. For example, the ability to identify what the...	10-16-2015	1476	4

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[Theme Editor] Globally Customize Icons

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