How to determine Assignment owner/creator via API?

Hi, this seems like such a basic question that I feel like I must be missing something, but I checked the documentation and forums and could not find anything. Apologies in advance if this is documented somewhere.

When retrieving an assignment via API through the "Get a single assignment" endpoint (https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/assignments.html#method.assignments_api.show), how can it be determined who is the assignment owner/creator, or in other words, who is the "teacher" that assigned it?

I checked the documentation (https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/assignments.html#Assignment) and there's no "user", "account" or "owner" value being returned that would point in the right direction.

As I understand it, Courses can have multiple Teachers in them, meaning that the person that created the Course is not necessarily going to be the same person that created the Assignment, correct?

If so, what's the proper way to determine the Assignment's owner/creator user id?

Thanks.

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JamesSekcienski

It doesn't look like the API supports this information for the REST API or GraphQL.

If you have access to the requests tables from Canvas Data, you might be able to find out who created by looking at the time the assignment was created and find the request at that time in the requests table of Canvas Data. If you can find the request, then you can find which user made the request to create the assignment.

FunkyPajamas

Hi @JamesSekcienski thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the request tables, as those don't appear to be part of the API.

James

@FunkyPajamas

Canvas Data is separate from the API. The requests table is huge; I mean HUGE. It's similar to the page views that administrators can get for users, but for every user and almost every request across the institution. There is a lot of overhead in getting it working. Much of the information is available in Canvas (provided you don't want to go back more than a year -- don't quote me on that duration).

Through the API, Canvas administrators have access to the List user page views endpoint. That endpoint supports start_time and end_time parameters that allow you to jump back to a point in time without having to paginate backwards through every request to get there.

What you can attempt is to take a list of all of the people who might have made the change (a list of all of your teachers -- potentially TA's, instructional designers, etc) and then gather the page views for each of them around the time when the assignment was created. If you find a match, then you have the culprit person responsible.

If the assignment was recently created, you might be able to look at the People page in Canvas and see who has been active since the page was created to help narrow down the list of possible perpetrators.

If it is super-important and an isolated case, you may be able to reach out to your CSM at Instructure and have them look into it.

If this is a recurring issue, then going forward, you can use Live Events from the Canvas Data Services. You can set it up to send an event message every time an assignment is created or updated. You can set up an AWS SQS queue and the pricing is pretty cheap (I think there's a million free events a month and there shouldn't be that many assignment creation or updates). Anyway, the event message includes information about the person making the request. This approach cannot go back and re-create events and it makes a best-attempt to send it, but there may be events that are missed. Events expire, so you will need to poll the events and store them locally, just in case you run into an issue where the assignment was created more than 14 days ago.

FunkyPajamas

Hi @James thank you kindly for such an extensive and informative reply. I must apologize: I should have described my use case in the initial post; I had assumed the owner/creator of the assignment to be such an integral piece of data that I just figured there was something obvious I was missing in the documentation, and decided to skip the use case to keep the initial post brief. Sorry about that.

The use case is for a third party integration with districts using Canvas, by way of the API: we (content provider) receive an LTI request from Canvas to SSO a user coming through a Canvas Assignment. The user is most assuredly not the Assignment creator but an assignee (student), and so we must connect the "student" to the "teacher" in our system (for grading/feedback). The initial plan was to retrieve the Assignment creator information from the API and match that against our dataset.

The List user page views would work but it sounds a tad computationally expensive (API request per user, then try to find the matching page request for assignment creation), so I think we'll have to rethink our strategy for what we're trying to do.

Again, thanks for taking the time to look into it.

FunkyPajamas

Thanks again @James . I have a meeting later today with the product owner, so I will share this information with them. I do agree that we may be going down the wrong path, so we'll determine what our options are and whether we need to rethink our strategy/use case.

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