Attendance - Last name formatting including spaces

Question

When looking at student names in Attendance, their last name appears formatted as bold.

We have individuals whose last name consists of two words. When their name appears in Attendance, only the last of those two words is bolded. For instance:

Consider William Sitting Bull, whose Canvas "sortable name" appears as Sitting Bull, William

William's name appears as William Sitting Bull when it should appear as William Sitting Bull

Can anything be done about this formatting discprepancy?

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @aaron_bahmer,

I just did a bit of investigation into this with my institutions Canvas environment.  At first I thought perhaps the names in Canvas were just entered incorrectly and maybe just fixing the sortable name.  I went through our provisioning report and finally found a user with a last_name field with a space in it, and sure enough when I went to the attendance tool in a class that person is enrolled in, only one of the last names was bolded.  It seems like the code for the attendance tool must be making some assumptions about last names being only the thing after the last space, but we know that's not correct.  I'd recommending reporting this to Canvas Support so they can log the issue and hopefully get it corrected eventually.  As of this moment, I don't think there's anything that can be done by users to fix this issue.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

aaron_bahmer · Accepted Answer

After following up with a bug report, I was informed the system was working as designed. I have submitted an idea to resolve this issue and met with my CSM.