Dynamically build a link to the Inbox

I already built an LTI tool that let's teachers contact student's parents as well as directly open the index box for a student and populate the name of the student. A teacher can just type the message and send. In that case the course dropdown does not need to be selected. But now I want a student to be able to do the same thing for the teacher, but apparently the course needs to be selected from the dropdown. I am aware of the regular ways the students can message their teachers in their courses.

I found the link by clicking on a messaging icon in the user details of any of my students. It looks like this: https://myschool.instructure.com/conversations?context_id=course_7832&user_id=1501&user_name=Firstname%20Lastname I can dynamically create that link in my LTI for any student or the teacher, and it will populate the name into the name field but doesn't select the course and I was wondering if someone knew how.

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Accepted answers

Robert

Looks like I wasn't paying attention to where I placed it and there is a #filter, so placing it after the filter seems to work.

/conversations?context_id=course_&user_id=&user_name=First%20Last#filter=type=inbox&course=course_

All comments

Robert

Hi @marchermon

I was able to reproduce your scenario by creating a similar link. The link does open the Inbox and establish Compose Message modal with the user selected in the To field.

Try adding &course=course_ to the URL string and it should populate the Course field.

marchermon

I tried it but it won't populate the course. Are you saying you were able to get it to work?

Robert

Looks like I wasn't paying attention to where I placed it and there is a #filter, so placing it after the filter seems to work.

/conversations?context_id=course_&user_id=&user_name=First%20Last#filter=type=inbox&course=course_

marchermon

Awesome, that did the trick! Thanks so much for taking the time!

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