Table of Contents

Canvas API Utilities

Jason Carroll Updated by Jason Carroll

Introduction

Maximize your productivity with the "CAPI100 Canvas API Utilities" section in Canvas. Utilize the powerful tools to streamline processes and simplify tasks that would be otherwise complex or time-consuming to execute manually. The utilities are divided into three categories: Content Reuse, Document Generation, and Wrike API Reporting.

You must be in Student View to access the utilities. Once in student view, instructions for using it will appear below.

The following utilities are currently available:

Content Reuse Query Utilities

As of February 2023, some of these utilities take quite a while to run because of the amount of API calls are necessary for them to provide their output. There is an effort currently underway to warehouse the Canvas data from both Canvas instances into our AWS RedShift instance - once this effort is completed, it is possible these utilities could be rewritten to access the data from RedShift instead of the Canvas API which could substantially improve run times.
Some of these utilities currently access data from the beta instances of lms.ecornell.com and canvas.cornell.edu. These test instances backsync every week to pull the latest data from production, so the data being queried may be a maximum of five days old.

This Course Reuse Search can be used to search both instances of Canvas for potential all potential uses of content from a specified course. This utility on average takes about 15-25 minutes to complete its search.

This Module Reuse Search utility allows you to search all courses in both Canvas instances for all uses of a particular module title or segment of a module title. This utility on average takes about 5-15 minutes to complete its search.

Page Reuse Search

This Page Reuse Search utility allows you to search all courses in both Canvas instances for all uses of a particular page title or segment of a page title. This utility on average takes about 15-25 minutes to complete its search.

Content Snippet Reuse Search

This Content Snippet Reuse utility allows you to search all courses in both Canvas instances for all uses of a snippet of page content.

Important: This utility makes a ton of API requests in order to function, and as a result takes an extremely long time (up to an entire day or more) if you do not enable any filters.
Single Course Content Search

Use this Single Course Content Search utility to search a specified course for a snippet of page/HTML content. In addition to wiki pages, it includes assignments, quizzes, and discussions within the scope of content search.

Course Diff Utility

Use this Course Diff Utility when you want to see what changed when a course was repurposed and adapted into a different course. Running this utility will show you which pages are only in one course but not the other, and the wiki pages that are shared between both. It will also indicate whether or not wiki page content is different between the courses for the mutual pages, meaning if they were edited. This utility will not give you a breakdown of what exactly is different between two page's contents, to do that, use the Page Diff utility.

Page Diff Utility

Use this Page Diff Utility when you want to see what exactly changed when a page was used in a different course.

This has the ability to do a diff between an assignment, discussion, or quiz page's content in addition to wiki pages.

Document Makers

Course Transcript Maker

This Course Transcript Maker utility can be used to generate an HTML course transcript, which can then be easily converted to a final PDF using Chrome. Transcripts can be generated on both lms.ecornell.com and canvas.cornell.edu. 

Video Transcripts Utility

This Video Transcripts Utility utility can be used generate a PDF with all of the pages that include videos in a course, including their transcripts. Transcripts can be generated on both lms.ecornell.com and canvas.cornell.edu. 

MOP Bot

This Mop Bot utility creates a baseline of the “Outline” tab of your MOP automatically for you. This Outline tab will need to be further customized by you, but the goal is to get most of the repetitive work of populating the tab taken care of for you!

Wrike API Utilities

Program Updates Evaluation Report

This Program Updates Evaluation Report utility can be used to generate a report of which programs are most out of date relative to their evaluation frequency and when they were last evaluated for updates.

Currently Collaborating Faculty Report

This Currently Collaborating Faculty Report utility can be used to generate a list/CSV of the faculty we are currently working with, by querying the A2 and C2 folders in Wrike and compiling all of the faculty specified in the Faculty custom field, separating out multiple faculty into separate list items, and removing duplicates.

It’s recommend using this report while logged in as your student account or masquerading as it, if you want to save the CSV reports for later. Otherwise, download the CSV reports for future reference before you end your student view session if you use generic student view.

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