After a conversation with one of our participants, I realized I haven’t updated you in a bit, and it would be helpful to share a snapshot of the feedback we’ve gotten, work in progress, and areas we’re still exploring. I’ll also update our changelog as these changes go out, so that’s where to keep an eye out!
Changes that are out in beta as of October 9:
- We received feedback that often when adding an exception you want to be able to quickly go to that context to check if it worked properly. To support this we have changed the name of each context to be a link that can be clicked to access that sub-account or course.
- The Add Exception flow had a “Done” button instead of “Save” which was inconsistent with the rest of Canvas - we updated the text to say “Save.”
Changes we are currently coding which we expect to be done soon:
- Some apps cannot open Availability and Exceptions due to the lti_registration_id not getting set in the backend. We’re resolving this bug.
- For configurations set up prior to Availability and Exceptions which do not have any deployments there is no action that can be taken from the Availability and Exceptions tab. We’re adding a button that allows you to create a root level deployment in a “Not Available” status from this page, which will then allow you to start creating exceptions.
- Portfolio installations were not loading from the Manage tab, this will be resolved
Changes we have not started coding yet, but will be working through:
- When adding exceptions we will list sub-accounts first instead of courses, since most often this is what users will be managing.
- We plan to fix a bug which prevents adding multiple exceptions in certain conditions. (For example, if you do not yet have an exception for Sub-account 1, and try to add exceptions for Course A and Course B, which are both within Sub-account 1, it errors.)
- We will be changing the “Course ID” language to “Course Code”
- We will add support for searching by the Canvas Course ID (the value found in the URL)
- Some accessibility fixes around things like initial focus when opening a modal, voiceover text clarification, and hovertext for both keyboard and mouse users.
- Adding a help icon linking to Community documentation
- Adding an alert when a registration is being created which has the same domain as an existing registration
- Fixing a bug around how Availability and Exceptions interacts with the on/off toggle on the old Dev Keys page. Repro info: when Availability & Exceptions is turned on and a configuration is added via the old dev keys page, leaving the key off, and then going to Availability & Exceptions and switching the deployment to “Available” it becomes available even though the key is turned off. We will be adding a check that ensures tools can never be accessed when the developer key is set to off on the old page.
- Related to this we are exploring where we can surface the on/off setting within Canvas Apps
In addition to all of this we’ve been moving forward with a richer history tab which will let you see not only when things were changed and by whom, but review the specific changes which occurred. We anticipate that work being done by the end of the month and then we’ll make it available to this group on the next deploy date.
On my list to think through is the org tree view when adding an exception. It’s a very small space, which makes it challenging to use in larger organizations. Right now the search only searches the current level you’re accessing, not the sub-accounts below it. This is confusing, but we worry that changing it will mean that so many results show up that it’s not useful any more. I’m continuing to think about what we can do here and working with our UX team, but if anyone in this group has ideas we’re definitely open to suggestions! (Is the tree view a helpful feature to you, or would you rather just have more space for the search bar?)
If you have a suggestion or have found an issue that isn’t listed here, please let me know! Also if you have feedback on things which would make this EAP more valuable to you, please let us know that as well. A big thank you to the person who mentioned that transparency about the current areas we’re working on improving would be helpful, as well as thank yous to everyone who has pointed out places where we can improve the feature.
