TamperMonkey-GreaseMonkey-Postman Tutorial

dwillmore

 @James ‌ has created many great scripts using TamperMonkey/GreaseMonkey that many use.  He also has created the GitHub canvancement which is awesome.   I am an admin with limited coding skills and new to TamperMonkey/GreaseMonkey and Postman and I imagine other administrators are in the same boat.  I would love for the experts here to gather into a team to develop a series of https://community.canvaslms.com/community/ideas/canvaslive?sr=search&searchId=58ed0fb7-8725-474c-be12-53493d3809b9&searchIndex=0‌ webinar sessions that takes anyone using Canvas from simple user to Coding/API master.   What do https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/canvas-developers?sr=search&searchId=5f684eff-bd97-4da2-89b2-9f037073f0d6&searchIndex=0‌ folks think about this?  Would anyone like/have time to join this user group team?  It would also be great to have developers from Canvas to join us as well.

James

 @dwillmore ,

When I started Canvancements, I tried to pick a term generic enough that other people could jump in and help out, so it would be awesome if there were an army of coding engineers. Along the line, I discovered that there were many people in a boat like yours -- limited (or no) coding skills, but wishing there was an easier way.

There are many fancier, much better written, programs out there than what I put out. I suspect there are a few reasons why Canvancements seem popular (I don't do any tracking, so I don't know for sure).

• They are written so that a typical user can run them. Using either Google Sheets or user scripts that add a link or button in Canvas. Many of the other scripts I've seen require Python or Java or NodeJS and a development environment.  but typical users don't know how to implement that or do the extra little programming to make it work for them.
• They're announced in the Community. Thank  @kona  for that as my chief advocate and the list of Canvancements - Canvas Enhancements that she keeps. The people writing these other programs are usually programming for their institution's needs and many even share their code on GitHub, but there's no central, well-advertised place where they can be found. If such a place existed, there may not be as many questions in the Community asking for the same things over and over. There's no guarantee of that, people still come in and ask for the same thing. Also notice that Instructure employees are reticent to recommend any solution other than their own. Canvas shouldn't be endorsing something that their engineers haven't checked out and given a stamp of approval.
• They meet needs (or at least come close) of those in the Community. For QuizWiz, I took and pulled together lots of feature requests from the Community to see what the common themes were. I then tried to implement the major ones that I didn't find pedagogically appalling. In other cases, it may just be one comment by someone - like the ability to highlight the unanswered questions when grading one question at a time.
• They are timely. Many of the ideas that I wrote code to implement were based off what I found here in the Community. I got tired of Canvas coming back with "That's a great idea, but it's not happening in the next 6 months." I understand that, but some people don't want to wait six months, or as it turns out much longer, and it may be never, for something to develop.
• They can do things that Canvas can't or won't do.
  • Canvas will never be able to offer a spreadsheet that allows people to edit all the due-dates in one place. Canvas can offer a web-page that allows editing all due dates, but then you don't get the power of formulas to make changes and set your dates based off other dates. Canvas could add a button that says "Show answers as soon as assignment is closed for submission".
  • Canvas can't make some things instantaneously inside the browser because they would take too long to generate. My scripts may be fine for small courses but fail miserably with large ones. Canvas has to support them all, whereas a teacher in a large class may just decide not to use my scripts.
  • Canvas has to make sure things are accessible and work in all supported browsers and on multiple devices. I can say "This won't work in MS Edge and I don't have any intention of wasting time to make it."
  • Canvas has to look at return on investment. Where do you spend your money? Do you dedicate 100 hours of engineering time to make 1% of users happy? I won't leave you hanging, the answer is probably no. What about 10% of users?
  • Canvas has to balance whatever they do against their "clean and easy to use" principles (quotes are mine). If you support everything that everyone wants to do, you soon have a very cluttered interface that isn't easy to understand. That in-turns increases the need for support. The Community is full of examples where people get stuck trying to understand something and can't move forward and increasing the complexity will make that worse.

I recently had the chance to meet with some people at Canvas. I was concerned about the move to ReactJS, the deprecation of jQuery UI, the not-exposing certain objects anymore, and other things making it harder to do what I do. From the conversations, I gathered a couple of things.

• They really don't want to make it easy for us to add this functionality. They didn't say that directly, but it was the little things like (paraphrased) "once we start using React, changing the DOM could break the way Canvas works" or "you should focus more on spreadsheets and external things than trying to modify the browser." I'm not even sure they're trying to make it harder for us, they're just not interested in making it easier for us.
• I'm a nobody. I keep telling people that, but Kona keeps insisting that Canvas is aware of the things I've done. That was not the experience I found. I mostly talked with managers, but I think most of them showed up because it was placed on their calendar but had no idea who I was or why I was there.

Beyond all that, which is just commentary to get the ball rolling, how did you arrive at the combination of user scripts and Postman? They seem similar but separate. Postman can get you started to figure out what you need to help with the user scripts, as can the live API, but it would also help with writing in any language.