Submitting an Assignment via API

Question

Hi - I'm getting a 422 Unprocessable Entity error when I try to test this API call (I'm using Advanced REST Client) :

https://class.yciw.net/api/v1/courses/114/assignments/3784/submissions?as_user_id=2398&submission[submission_type]=online_url&submission[url]=www.google.com

I'm using my admin access code in the header. Trying to submit this on behalf of student "2398."

Is it formatted incorrectly?

Thanks

Matt

unknown · Answer

Thank you James so much!  I've been so frustrated by this so I greatly appreciate your help.

I verified all of your suggestions and everything checked out. Is this not working because I'm misunderstanding how to use the masquerading feature??  User 2398 is a student without permissions to masquerade and I'm using my access token in the header. This feature is supposed to work the other way around right?  A user would masquerade as someone with permissions that can masquerade....   (???)

I've attached a pic for what it looks like in ARC for me...

I'm building an app that needs to allow the user (after going through the Oauth dance) to submit an assignment. Should I be doing this some other way??

The reason I put the as_user_id in there was because I wasn't being allowed to submit an assignment as a student.

James · Answer

matt5834,

I just tried this using ARC and it worked fine for me. It generates a "201 Created" response code.

I took your URL and my URL and pasted them next to each other and then put your IDs into my URL and I didn't see any differences, so I think you have the syntax correct.

Here are some things to look at.

* Make sure you're using POST and not GET or PUT
* Make sure you're using the Canvas User ID and not a SIS User ID. If you're using a SIS User ID, you need as_user_id=sis_user_id:2398. I verified that it worked both ways
* Try GET /v1/courses/114/assignments/3784/submissions to make sure that you have the right course and assignment.
* Make sure the assignment can still be submitted. I don't think that's the reason, but if I'm throwing out ideas ..

Finally, this is not the reason, but www.google.com is not a URL. The URL includes the protocol, so https://www.google.com would be the correct way. Browsers often work if you type it into the location bar that way, but if you include it as a link on a web page, it probably (Apache does this by default, not sure about other webservers) gets turned into a relative link because it doesn't have the protocol and then you get a notice that it can't find the page www.google.com on the server. However, I tested it with www.google.com and Canvas took it -- but it also added http and not https to it. Still, it would be better to actually submit a URL.