December Update

This update will be a short one, but I wanted to keep everyone up to date. We've officially released Availability and Exceptions into Beta for all customers! We added in a few bonus features, which will be new to you - the biggest being the enhanced History tab! Below is the rough draft of the relevant portion of a blog post that will be going out to all customers when this reaches production.

This tab provides transparency by logging every update to a tool:

When the change occurred
Who made it
Which fields were affected (including availability and exceptions)
Before and after values for the fields

If a tool disappears or suddenly breaks, you can instantly check the full change log for configuration or availability/exception updates to troubleshoot quickly. This should simplify troubleshooting and improve transparency across your organization.

The other change you'll notice is a smaller one - the old Dev Keys page now links each key to the Canvas Apps tool details page to make it easier to quickly navigate to the new solution. This replaces the "Show Key" button which previously gave the Secret for the key. Since this value does not do anything for LTI keys (only for API keys) we felt comfortable making this change to provide more valuable information.

Up next we're continuing work on dynamic registration updates, which will allow dynamically registered tools to notify admins that an update is available and allow them to review and accept or reject those changes. Following that work we plan to use a similar design for inherited key updates as well (and finally allow customization of certain inherited key fields in a way that won't be overridden by changes made by Instructure!) I'll keep folks updated as the inherited key work becomes available for early testing and feedback.

As always, if you have feedback or questions I'm happy to hear them! Hopefully these changes help brighten your December (we're close to the darkest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere!)

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Comments

Tasha_Biesinger

@AlexisNast Would you all consider adding an "Add Exception" button to the top of the App's Manage page? We have some legacy integrations that were installed in ~300 subaccounts and when I need to add an exception for a specific course, I need to scroll, load, scroll, load dozens of times to get to the bottom of the list of existing installs to reach the Add Exception button.

I suspect it would be technically challenging or impossible to reconfigure existing non-root deployments into this new structure and nested within the root - but it would be fabulous if I'm somehow wrong about the difficulty of doing this. 😊

AlexisNast

I'm not sure what the timeline is going to look like for it, but we've figured out designs for a feature to allow you to combine all your existing course level deploys into exceptions under the root! Our basic idea for it:
1. If you already have just one root level deployment, it will merge everything under it (and they will all share that deployment ID, which we warn about a couple times in the flow!)
2. If you do not have a root level deployment you can create one and then merge everything
3. If you have multiple root level deployments (why?) we can't auto-merge and you'll need to do it manually or remove all but one. This limitation saves significant dev time and complexity so you don't have to pick which one things move to.

I'll think about what we can do in the case where you want to keep those individual deployments for some reason but still add exceptions. Please let me know if you have feedback on this consolidation feature concept as well.

Tasha_Biesinger

That sounds like a good process to me and can't think of a case for keeping deployments separate, but I'll share with our team just to get more minds thinking it through.

Tasha_Biesinger

A new but related topic, and perhaps one you've talked about and I missed:

Currently the API doesn't have information about exceptions so when we deploy to the root account as disabled, but then want to add exceptions (enabled) for ~300 subaccounts we cannot currently do that through the API. For now, we still have to do multiple deployments directly to the subaccounts. I suspect that you all already have a to-do for updating the API for this?

Tasha_Biesinger

When I look at the Availability and Exceptions page for a tool, I am seeing Exceptions listed for courses that appear to have been deleted. Should that be the case? If not, I'll submit a support ticket. If so, may I suggest a toggle option to display/not display deleted courses/subaccounts that is set to not display by default?

jmerlenbach2

We noticed this this week too! But, also with sub-account deployments when the sub-account no longer exists. We can open a support ticket if needed as well.

jmerlenbach2

Hey Alexis! We like this idea of being able to merge the course level deploys into the root deployment! Like Tasha, I'll socialize it around to our team but on the surface, as long as it is an optional feature, it sounds great!

AlexisNast

That was not intended to be the case! You're welcome to submit a support ticket so that it gets linked to the dev ticket, but if you'd rather not then I'm happy to just make the dev ticket for it now, since it's definitely a bug. The intended behavior is that when you delete a course (or subaccount, thanks @jmerlenbach2 ) then the exception is deleted as well.

jmerlenbach2

Thanks Alexis! I did make a support ticket this morning - Case 13475232

Thanks for your consistent responsiveness and quick resolutions!

AlexisNast

I thought we had an API for this, we published a draft of the new API docs here:

https://community.instructure.com/en/discussion/658312/api-access

I haven't dug in on this specific use-case yet, though, so later today I'll dig in on it and try to get back to you in the next couple days. Just wanted to offer the link in case it had gotten lost in the Community migration.

Tasha_Biesinger

I haven't figured out how to get notified when you leave comments in this group (will spend some time investigating), but I'll second Josh's appreciation for your responsiveness and resolutions! :)

Chris

Hi @Tasha_Biesinger,

To get notifications, go to the group homepage then flick the follow button and check everything (or whatever you'd like).

-Chris