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lsloan · ‎02-01-2023

While working with Canvas rubrics, I've found that RubricCriterion objects' `id` property values seem to be special. Unlike most IDs, they are not integers. Instead, they are strings and they start with an underscore ("_"). See the example in the documentation… https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/rubrics.html#:~:text=A%20RubricCriterion%20object%20looks%20like%3A Why is this ID value format so special? Does the underscore indicate that it is to be joined to something else, like to the ID of the rubric in which it appears? Are these criterion IDs unique among all criterion, or only within the associated rubric? Is the ID following the underscore always an integer? That could lend itself to being an ID for the criterion when it is stored in another data source.

lsloan · ‎12-13-2022

Does this application still only support LTI 1.1? Is there any LTI 1.3 support planned?

lsloan · ‎12-13-2022

Why is a URL for "https://www.facebook.com/Zionstar.in" shown above in the "Links" table? Is that related? How?

lsloan · ‎12-05-2022

Thank you for the response. However, when I use that API function, the only comments returned are the submission comments, which are comments entered by the instructor/TA on the submission document(s). The comments I need are the reviewer (apparently known as "assessor" in Canvas terminology) comments. I've been discussing this with a colleague and he's come across a possible solution: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/rubrics.html#method.rubrics_api.show That is, the rubrics function with very specific flags… /api/v1/courses/:course_id/rubrics/:id?include[]=peer_assessments&style=full The specific combination of `include[]` and `style` flags may be what I have been missing. I will investigate further and give an update soon.

lsloan · ‎12-05-2022

Researchers at the University of Michigan would like to perform AI analysis of the comments left by reviewers in Canvas' Peer Review feature. After browsing through the Canvas API documentation and exploring the Canvas live API, I've not been able to find an API function that will let us access those comments. Does an API function exist for reading peer review comments? I've found that the API will show me who has been assigned to review each author's submissions, but I can't find the review comments. The only comments I've been able to access are the submission comments, but those are made by the instructor/TA only, they don't include peer review comments.

lsloan · ‎11-08-2022

Yes, I think so. I've contacted the Canvas product manager at UMich about it. I've been told that I have all the permissions that could possibly be granted to me in Canvas. However, it still doesn't work for me. Maybe the request I'm sending has more headers than the bare minimum required. That could cause problems. @matthew_buckett, when your request is sent, does it only have the "Content-Type" and "Authorization" headers? (And probably "Content-Length" automatically added by curl.)

lsloan · ‎11-03-2022

I have an unfortunate update to this… My personal Canvas API token seems to work with getting information about existing Developer Keys, but it does not work with creating them. I'm not sure whether I don't have enough access in my Canvas account to do this or maybe this can't be done with an API token.

lsloan · ‎11-02-2022

Hi, @matthew_buckett. Thanks for the response. As it turns out, I noticed the undocumented API myself on Thursday last week. I used the Google Chrome developer tools to watch the network requests, then used the "Copy as cURL" feature to get the requests as curl commands. They included a lot of headers that are specific to the browser that I deleted, then I added an "Authorization: Bearer" header with my Canvas API token and it works great. I have a couple of scripts for getting keys and for creating them. If anyone is interested in trying them, just tell me. I can tidy up the code and share it. Thanks for the reference to the controller code in Canvas' GitHub repo, too!

lsloan · ‎10-21-2022

Are there any Canvas API functions for managing Developer Keys? At the very least, I'd like to be able to view and to create API keys and LTI keys via the API. Why? My organization has multiple Canvas instances. One of them is a test instance that I use to test Canvas integration code I develop. However, that test instance gets wiped out and replaced with the contents of the production instance every two weeks. That means the API and LTI keys I had in the test instance are deleted every two weeks. Theoretically, I could probably create keys in the production instance for the test environment and let them get synced into place every two weeks. My managers do not want me to do that, though, citing security concerns. I've been perusing the Canvas Live API for functions to work with Developer Keys, but I haven't found any. I'd appreciate suggestions about this. Thanks!

lsloan · ‎10-07-2021

Hi, all. My colleagues and I noticed a strange behavior in Canvas recently. If a section from one course (say, ID=1) gets cross-listed to another course (ID=2) and subsequently gets re-cross-listed back to the original course (again, ID=1), the Canvas UI and API get into an unusual state. That is, the UI still shows the "De-Cross-List" button for the section. Clicking it and approving the action appears to be successful, showing the message "Section successfully de-cross-listed!". However, the "De-Cross-List" button remains. No matter how many times that button is used, it never goes away. In the API, the data for the re-cross-listed section refers to itself… { "id": 550100, "name": "re-cross-list me to my original course!", "course_id": 1, "nonxlist_course_id": 1 } (That is only an excerpt of the full data returned for section.) If we call API functions to de-cross-list the section, they always succeed, but requesting the data about the section never changes. Likewise, the UI for the section appears as described above. Granted, this seems to be a rare case. As far as we can tell, sections may get re-cross-listed back to their original course because of one of the following scenarios… Someone wanted to de-cross-list the section, but they accidentally clicked the "re-cross-list" button instead and followed the prompts. Someone cross-listed and re-cross-listed the section to one after another multiple courses. At some point in the process, they forgot which course the section was cross-listed to originally, so they happened to re-cross-list it to that course. I think the Canvas UI/API logic should be changed to automatically de-cross-list sections when appropriate. That is, if a section is being re-cross-listed to its original course, then that operation should be treated as de-cross-listing instead. That would leave the section UI in a good state, without the "de-cross-list" button and the API would no longer show that the section is cross-listed because the `nonxlist_course_id` value would be `null`.

lsloan · ‎10-07-2021

Thank you, @mzimmerman and @Chris_Hofer, for the advice. For whatever reasons not explained to me, my colleagues/managers specifically told me to NOT use the SIS import function in the Canvas API. They said that they didn't like the disconnected nature of it and vaguely alluded to problems with using that function. Aside from that, I think part of the problem is that the users who will provide the CSV do not have access to the SIS IDs of the users that will be enrolled in the section, but they do know the users' login IDs. When we call the `/v1/sections/{section_id}/enrollments` API function to add users one by one, we use the `sis_login_id:` prefix for the `user_id` parameter to enroll the users by that ID. If the SIS import function can support that, too, then I don't think the lack of SIS ID will be a problem. I'll just need to decode why my colleagues are so opposed to using the SIS import function. In the meantime, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to work with/around Canvas API's rate-limit features, which appeared when we started sending many (400+) asynchronous requests to `/v1/sections/{section_id}/enrollments` API function all at once. The solution turned out to be to reactively add a few seconds wait (2–5) before retrying any of those many requests that fail. Again, this is the solution that my colleagues directed me to use. I wanted to take advantage of the rate-limit headers the Canvas API returns so we could implement proactive request throttling, but I was overruled. 🤷

lsloan · ‎07-27-2021

I need to use the Canvas API to enroll multiple users (up to 400 per batch) into an existing course section. I see the API will let me POST one user enrollment per API call using the " /v1/sections/{section_id}/enrollments" function. Is there a different function that would let me enroll multiple users with a single API call? Maybe some SIS import function? I'd rather not take the slow approach of iterating over the list of users and enrolling them one at a time.

lsloan · ‎03-30-2021

I like using Markdown for most documentation. Using the visual editor in Canvas can be tedious. The HTML it generates is messy. Instructors and staff often ask why it's so difficult to make their documents look right in Canvas. Supporting Markdown would simplify documentation maintenance a lot. I think some users may still require a visual editor, but behind the scenes, their document would be in Markdown. I think one of the challenges would be to provide helpers for constructing links to other pages and resources within each course.

lsloan · ‎02-08-2021

In the Canvas REST API documentation, I've found that these two entries seem to be identical: /api/v1/courses/:course_id/users /api/v1/courses/:course_id/search_users Are they really two entries that do the same thing? Does one refer to the other? Is one of them deprecated?

lsloan · ‎09-01-2020

Thank you very much. That makes sense. I need to find some documentation of the LTI lifecycle. I probably wouldn't have even asked this question if I knew which documentation to RTFM. 🙂

lsloan · ‎08-30-2020

I'd asked this question before, but it's probably more appropriate for this developers' forum. I've configured an LTI key in Canvas with a URL in the "Public JWK URL" field. After inspecting the traffic to my server, I see that Canvas never requests that URL. However, the tool works fine. How can this be?

lsloan · ‎08-29-2020

I've configured an LTI key in Canvas with a URL in the Public JWK URL field. After inspecting the traffic to my server, I see that Canvas never requests that URL. However, the tool works fine. How can this be?

lsloan · ‎02-07-2020

Does the Canvas API provide an entry for downloading all submissions for an assignment as a single file? I see that's available in the Canvas UI. Instructors can click a link to download all submissions as a single ZIP file. I maintain a program that occasionally needs to download all submissions for specific assignments. Sometimes the course size is large (1800+ students). Downloading each submission takes at least two HTTP requests. When all/most of the students of a large course make submissions for an assignment, then that means 3600+ requests are being made. This can take several minutes to complete (I timed it at 18+ minutes one time). I've looked through the Canvas Live API for an entry to download all submissions, but I didn't find one. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? Bonus: This goes along with an earlier question I asked about getting submissions as PDF. If it were possible to download all assignment submissions as PDFs in a single ZIP file, that would be even better.

lsloan · ‎02-07-2020

In Canvas SpeedGrader, I see that students' submissions (for example, a Word document) is shown on the page as a PDF and that an annotated PDF of the submission can be downloaded. Is that submission-to-PDF feature available in the Canvas API? I maintain an LTI application that lets students download a copy of some of their peers' submissions for review. A problem that has occurred many times is that the Word document submitted cannot be opened by the person doing the review. As a workaround, when reviewing students complain, the course TAs will download the problematic submission as a PDF from SpeedGrader then email it to them. This is a cumbersome workaround, so I think it might be better for the LTI application to get submissions as PDF rather than the original file format to prevent incompatibility problems. I've looked through the Canvas Live API for an entry point that might provide this feature, but I can't find it. I suppose I could try to see how SpeedGrader produces the PDFs and replicate that, but that would take a lot of time. I'd rather use the API, if there's an entry for this.

lsloan · ‎02-07-2020

Another bump! I think someone must have some experience with this.

Post Details	Date Published	Views	Likes
underscore in RubricCriterion object IDs? While working with Canvas rubrics, I've found that RubricCriterion objects' `id` property values seem to be special. Unlike most IDs, they are not integers. Instead, they are strings and ...	02-01-2023	148	0
API functions to access peer review comments? Researchers at the University of Michigan would like to perform AI analysis of the comments left by reviewers in Canvas' Peer Review feature. After browsing through the Canvas API documentation and e...	12-05-2022	342	1
API functions to manage Developer Keys? Are there any Canvas API functions for managing Developer Keys? At the very least, I'd like to be able to view and to create API keys and LTI keys via the API. Why? My organization has multip...	10-21-2022	1067	2
BUG: Re-Cross-Listing sections to original course causes UI/API problems Hi, all. My colleagues and I noticed a strange behavior in Canvas recently. If a section from one course (say, ID=1) gets cross-listed to another course (ID=2) and subsequently gets re-cross-...	10-07-2021	412	0
How to enroll multiple users in a section with one API call? I need to use the Canvas API to enroll multiple users (up to 400 per batch) into an existing course section. I see the API will let me POST one user enrollment per API call using the " /v1/sections...	07-27-2021	923	0
REST API: "courses/:course_id/users" or "courses/:course_id/search_users"? In the Canvas REST API documentation, I've found that these two entries seem to be identical: /api/v1/courses/:course_id/users /api/v1/courses/:course_id/search_users Are they really two en...	02-08-2021	489	0
LTI key defined, "Public JWK URL" never used I'd asked this question before, but it's probably more appropriate for this developers' forum. I've configured an LTI key in Canvas with a URL in the "Public JWK URL" field. After inspe...	08-30-2020	1752	0
LTI key defined, Public JWK URL never used I've configured an LTI key in Canvas with a URL in the Public JWK URL field. After inspecting the traffic to my server, I see that Canvas never requests that URL. However, the tool works ...	08-29-2020	604	0
API: Download all assignment submissions? Does the Canvas API provide an entry for downloading all submissions for an assignment as a single file? I see that's available in the Canvas UI. Instructors can click a link to download ...	02-07-2020	1371	0
API: Get submissions as PDF? In Canvas SpeedGrader, I see that students' submissions (for example, a Word document) is shown on the page as a PDF and that an annotated PDF of the submission can be downloaded. Is that submission...	02-07-2020	667	0
Mark "External Tool" submission assignment as complete? I've developed an LTI that we use in several Univ. of Michigan courses on Canvas. We can create assignments that have a submission type of "External Tool" that will launch the LTI when students...	05-09-2019	1471	2
find courses assoc. with a specific outcome? Can I use Canvas data to find courses that are associated with a specific outcome?	07-12-2016	1627	5

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Member Since	‎07-07-2016

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underscore in RubricCriterion object IDs?

Re: Partner Listing: Kritik

Re: Partner Listing: Kritik

Re: API functions to access peer review comments?

API functions to access peer review comments?

Re: API functions to manage Developer Keys?

Re: API functions to manage Developer Keys?

Re: API functions to manage Developer Keys?

API functions to manage Developer Keys?

BUG: Re-Cross-Listing sections to original course ...

Re: How to enroll multiple users in a section with...

How to enroll multiple users in a section with one...

Re: Markdown support for canvas

REST API: "courses/:course_id/users" or "courses/:...

Re: LTI key defined, "Public JWK URL" never used

LTI key defined, "Public JWK URL" never used

LTI key defined, Public JWK URL never used

API: Download all assignment submissions?

API: Get submissions as PDF?

Re: Mark "External Tool" submission assignment as ...

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