Environment Variables for LTI 1.3?

[agschmid]

We've been using environment variables for many years now with our LTI 1.1 tools, but will be switching to LTI 1.3 in the near future, and haven't found anything about using environment variables with LTI 1.3. 

Does anyone have information on setting environment variables using json? 

[agschmid]

Instructure reply to our ticket:

After speaking to our engineers about this, we learned that this is unfortunately not supported with LTI 1.3 tools at this time.

[matthew_buckett]

We have successfully been using custom fields (is this what you mean by environmental variables?) from https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.tools_variable_substitutions.html with our LTI 1.3 tools in Canvas. Here's an example that references some of them.

{
    "title": "Account Tools",
    "scopes": [],
    "extensions": [
        {
            "platform": "canvas.instructure.com",
            "settings": {
                "platform": "canvas.instructure.com",
                "placements": [
                    {
                        "placement": "account_navigation",
                        "message_type": "LtiResourceLinkRequest",
                        "required_permissions": "read_reports"
                    }
                ]
            },
            "privacy_level": "anonymous"
        }
    ],
    "public_jwk": {},
    "description": "Run reports on users, roles and subaccounts.",
    "custom_fields": {
        "canvas_account_id": "${Canvas.account.id}",
        "canvas_account_name": "${Canvas.account.name}",
        "canvas_api_base_url": "$Canvas.api.baseUrl",
        "canvas_sis_account_id": "$Canvas.account.sisSourceId",
        "canvas_root_account_id": "${Canvas.rootAccount.id}",
        "canvas_user_prefers_high_contrast": "$Canvas.user.prefersHighContrast",
        "com_instructure_brand_config_json_url": "$com.instructure.brandConfigJSON.url"
    },
    "public_jwk_url": "https://lti.canvas.ox.ac.uk/.well-known/jwks.json",
    "target_link_uri": "https://static.canvas.ox.ac.uk/account-tools/",
    "oidc_initiation_url": "https://lti.canvas.ox.ac.uk/lti/login_initiation/universityofoxford-at"
}

[MattHanes]

When you do a Manual Entry of an LTI 1.3 tool from the user interface, it's in the Additional Settings under "Custom Fields". That way we have both answers in the thread in case someone looks here in the future. Here is a screenshot from one of ours:

[agschmid]

I'm talking about the environment variables when beta/test refresh that our LTI tools are pointing to the beta/test servers instead of production. 

We have used the environment variables for LTI 1.1 for years. Here's the documentation for that: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.tools_xml.html#test_env_settings

We would like to do the same thing for our LTI 1.3 tools

[matthew_buckett]

@agschmid Yeah, we used to use that feature too on LTI 1.1 and were disappointed that this isn't supported in LTI 1.3

[agschmid]

According to Instructure, "it doesn't seem like we've seen much need for this from our end users so far until now."

I've created an "idea": https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/Support-environment-variables-for-LTI-1-3/idi-...