Reformat Multiple Pages at once

MattMiddleton

Is there any way to reformat multiple pages in a Canvas Course or does that need to be done individually? 

James

@MattMiddleton 

James ( @james_whalley ) is on-track by saying we're not sure what you mean by reformat. It presumably means editing the page, making some change, and then saving the page. It's that middle step we're unsure of.

I'm going to assume that you're not using some templating system. If you were, it might have the capability to make global changes.

Canvas does not have any built-in bulk editing tools for pages. Canvas does not have any built-in bulk editing tools for a lot of things. For a long time, people used a Google Spreadsheet I wrote to bulk edit the due dates, but Canvas finally added their own solution for that.

To do any kind of bulk editing of pages, you would need to use the Pages REST API.

With a script (pick your favorite programming language), you can obtain a list of all the pages, filter them if necessary to just those you want to update, download each page, edit the page, and then update the page if it has changed.

For example, I have a weekly resource page for my statistics course that I update each week. Each semester, I run a script that downloads the page that was copied from the previous term and edits it. It changes the dates in the heading to match the current semester and adds a footer at the bottom of the page with links and other tools. I can also run this at any point during the semester if those tools or links change and it will update them.

I have another script that downloads every page and assignment in the course and looks for dates that fall outside the current semester. It's too easy for me to miss a "The discussion is open through Friday, November 3" when the semester runs from January through May. Or I have text that says "Open the IRC Data (FA23) Spreadsheet" but it should be SP24. That script doesn't automatically change things, but it alerts me to which things need changed.