Collaborations

Welcome to Our New API Docs! This is the new home for all things API (previously at Canvas LMS REST API Documentation).

Collaboration Placement

External tools can be configured to appear as a collaboration provider.

collaboration placement allows users to launch a tool to select a collaboration resource.

For an overview of Canvas collaborations, refer to the Canvas Community article.

Configuring

For configuration examples and links to the specification, please refer to the LTI Deep Linking documentation. Simply replace the assignment_selection text with collaboration in the XML (LTI 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2) or JSON (LTI 1.3) examples.

Supported Content Item Types

For Deep Linking, the collaboration placement supports the LTI Resource Link type.

Canvas also includes an optional extension to the LTI Resource link type at this placement. The extension allows specifying the users and/or groups that should be included as collaborators on the collaboration created for the returned resource.

Example deep linking response (decoded JWT):

{
  "type": "ltiResourceLink",
  "url": "http://www.test-tool.com/launch?deep_linking=true",
  "title": "Lti 1.3 Tool Title",
  "text": "Lti 1.3 Tool Text",
  "icon": "https://img.icons8.com/metro/1600/unicorn.png",
  "thumbnail": "https://via.placeholder.com/150?text=thumbnail",
  "https://canvas.instructure.com/lti/collaboration": {
    "users": ['02fb7032-1144-4d69-aab1-83c67bdecd2e'],
    "groups": ['e8d625b7-7f27-4a81-9b86-5dcb110e1943']
  }
}

This example would create a collaboration associated with the launch url and include all users included in the users property of the extension. Additionally it would include all users in the group identified by the groups property of the extension.

The IDs in the users array are the same IDs available in the Names & Roles Provisioning Service. These IDs are also the value of the sub claim in an LTI 1.3 launch.

The IDs in the groups array are also IDs available in the Names & Roles Provisioning Service. When making a request in the NRPS to list Group Memberships, the response's context.id attribute is the ID to include.

Migrating from LTI 1.1 to 1.3

A quirk of Canvas' LTI 1.1 implementation means that 1.1 collaboration launches do not send a unique resource_link_id. The 1.1 collaboration resource_link_id is always the LTI id of the collaboration's context (either a Course or Group).

When a 1.1 tool is upgraded to 1.3, the 1.1 resource link id is sent in the https://purl.imsglobal.org/spec/lti/claim/lti1p1 ID token claim. For migrated collaborations, this will always be the context's LTI id and will not be unique.

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This documentation is generated directly from the Canvas LMS source code, available on Github.