Hi all! Thanks again for your continued engagement with this Early Adopter Program. Below are the updates we’ve been working on over the past month - hopefully some significant quality of life improvements. We are currently targeting a January release to GA (more info on that to come) which means the current work the engineers are doing will be most of the final polish before GA (though of course the work doesn’t stop then!) Hopefully you’ll notice that a significant portion of the changes we were coding and issues we knew about last week have moved up to already being in beta or plan to complete shortly. If there are any issues which you think need to be urgently addressed before this can be released in production, please let me know!
In addition to these changes, I did want to let you know about an opportunity to provide us with feedback about integrations to Canvas more broadly. The goal with this research is to identify how integrations in Canvas impact your institution. We anticipate that this survey will take about 10-15 minutes to complete. If you know of other institutions which would be interested in providing feedback about their experiences with integrations in Canvas, please feel free to pass it along to them as well.
Changes that are out in beta as of November 20:
- We got the feedback that the first thing many of you wanted to do when adding an exception was go to where the tool was made available or unavailable and check if it was displaying properly. To facilitate this, when looking at the list of Availability & Exceptions each context listed is now a link to that context.
- Continued fixes to issues preventing existing tools from displaying correctly in Availability & Exceptions
- 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.
- Clearing the cache of any contexts where an availability or exception is added so that the tool immediately shows or is removed as appropriate.
- We fixed a bug which prevented adding multiple exceptions in certain conditions. (For example, if you did not yet have an exception for Sub-account 1, and tried to add exceptions for Course A and Course B, which were both within Sub-account 1, it errored.)
- The add exception browse option lists sub-accounts first. This still doesn’t resolve the fundamental issue that this is a small space to review your entire account structure, but hopefully it will help a bit.
- Updated the text identifying the Course Code to be displayed as “Course Code” instead of “Course ID” so that we’re using consistent language across Canvas.
- Not part of this EAP, but something I think this group would like to know about: search on API key scopes has been fixed - it now searches all scopes not just the headers. Additionally we are requiring scopes by default since that is the recommended behavior (though it can still be disabled if needed.)
- Not copying exceptions for a course when the course is copied.
Changes we are currently coding which we expect to be done soon:
- An expanded History tab which tracks who made changes, when, and what they specifically changed.
- 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
- We are adding support for searching for contexts by Course ID (the value in the URL.) This still won’t display in the UX, but you will be able to search for it to enable the use case of “instructor sends me the URL of their class to add a tool to.”
Changes we have not started coding yet, but will be working through:
- 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
- Adding the ability to modify the default icon within Canvas Apps
- After a tool is installed, immediately taking you to the tool details/Availability & Exceptions page rather than landing you back on the Manage page.
Upcoming projects
- We have been working on a way for tools installed via dynamic registration to receive updates (either initiated by you or by the tool provider requesting an update, providing a notification to you, and allowing you to review and accept/reject the update.)
- After the work above with dynamic registration updates, we plan to implement something similar for inherited keys as well as enable you to change specific values on inherited keys such as permissions and placements.
- We have begun discovery to determine if it will be possible to bring APIs into Canvas Apps. No timeline on this work yet, we are very much still in discovery! If you have thoughts about it, I’m definitely interested in hearing them though.
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. Thank you so much to everyone who has been participating and providing feedback as we go, it truly makes Canvas better.
