The APIs can achieve most things that are possible within the Canvas web interface. It is important to note that the APIs are for Canvas itself. Therefore tools installed such as LTIs will not be accessible through the Canvas APIs and are out of the scope of this document.
If your institution hosts Canvas with Instructure (Software as a Service), you can drop a request to Canvas Support. Also, if you are at the beginning of your implementation, your Canvas technical implementation staff member may be able to assist you (chat with your CSM).
To add a To-Do item, click the Add Item icon. Note: You can also use the Calendar to add to-do items, which will also display in the List View Dashboard.
When multiple courses include To Do items on a single date, courses are listed by Course Name and items are are listed by due time [1]. Graded items display the point value for the graded item [2]. To access a To Do item, click the item name [1].
There are several alternatives you may consider before you look at the APIs. I won't cover these in great detail, as there is a wealth of information already available, hence, I suggest you check out these links for more information.
Canvas Data – The Canvas Data platform provides a read-only view into some normalised data about your Canvas Instance. It is great for understanding ‘what HAS happened’ (with a delay of up to 36 hours). Primarily it is designed for reporting. Some institutions choose to leverage Canvas data to trigger when they should do something with the APIs (though, this is far less common). Another important note for Canvas Data is that 'deleted' data will not show in the Canvas Data exports, you will need the API to see any deleted records.
A great way to illustrate this is the Canvas Mobile App for iOS and Android. The mobile apps use the same APIs that are available to institutions and users, to interact with Canvas and present information to users on the run based on their user account. The mobile apps take the information that Canvas presents in the API Interface Example above, interpret that information, and then re-present it to the user with visual elements much like the Canvas Web interface.
So, what is pagination exactly? When you have large amounts of data that you are pulling out with the API, it would be incredibly system intensive to pull all that data out in a single call. One example includes using the API to list all courses in an account. You could conceivably have hundreds, if not thousands (if not possibly tens of thousands) of courses returned, depending on the size of your institution. If you made a single call and that retrieved all results, it could result in significant delay in even getting the results, and this is where pagination comes in!
So, you may be asking 'What is this API acronym'? API stands for Application Programmer Interface, and in this section, I will cover off some basics about what APIs are. When you access a website (such as Canvas), you are accessing an application. The application has a web interface that is written for humans to interpret information and interact with that information. These interactions may be adding data such as discussion posts, pages and module items or they might be changing data, such as updating student or staff information or enrolments in courses. This list is not extensive, and there are many other functions available. However, these are just some examples I will reference for highlighting the differences between the web interface of Canvas and the APIs.
Indeed they can! Canvas publishes the full API specification, and any user can interact with the APIs. The key to note here is that a user will only be able to access as much information in the APIs as they are permissible to within the Canvas Web Interface. Therefore, if a student tries to query information about their account, they will have the authorisation to get the details back. However, if they attempt to run a query for another users' account, they would get an access denied error. Equally, I will reiterate here that a user must have an authenticated account or access token for your institution to access the APIs, without which, the API calls will fail.
The APIs can achieve most things that are possible within the Canvas web interface. It is important to note that the APIs are for Canvas itself. Therefore tools installed such as LTIs will not be accessible through the Canvas APIs and are out of the scope of this document. The concepts herein, however, could be applied to any LTI vendor's APIs if they publish an API specification similar to the Canvas LMS API documentation .
You can do this using GraphQL, which can be invoked using the REST API, although it doesn't act like any of the rest of the REST API as far as pagination goes. I've also not used graphql through the REST API, so I'll describe how to do it through GraphiQL, the interactive graphql interface available by adding /graphiql to the end ...
Ask your Canvas questions and get help from over a million Community members from around the world.