Importing Quiz from QTI generated programmatically -- glitch with description and quiz_type fields

[baptnz]

Hi,

I have a technical question regarding QTI imports of quizzes, and I was wondering if someone familiar with Canvas imports could help me pin down the problem.

I've been testing the automatic generation of quiz material via the R {exams} package (https://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/exams/, https://www.r-exams.org/).

In short, it generates the XML and wraps it in a zip file that I can import in Canvas. It basically works, but there are two annoying glitches that I don't understand, and the package developer is also stumped.

We've made diffs of the QTI exported by Canvas and the one we're trying to import, and we've been unable to find a meaningful difference that would explain the failure to import two fields: the description of the quiz (a little blurb at the start of the page), and the quiz_type (assessment vs practice etc.).

These fields seem ignored in the import when we generate the XML via exams, but not when re-importing a QTI v1.2 previously exported from Canvas. It must be therefore a subtle difference in syntax somewhere, but it's hard to debug without knowing how Canvas imports these files internally.

Here's the content of assessment_meta.xml, if it helps:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<quiz identifier="Preliminary_Maths_Skills_Assessment_652597184" xmlns="http://canvas.instructure.com/xsd/cccv1p0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://canvas.instructure.com/xsd/cccv1p0 https://canvas.instructure.com/xsd/cccv1p0.xsd">
<title>Preliminary_Maths_Skills_Assessment</title>
<description>THIS DESCRIPTION LINE IS IGNORED, FOR SOME REASON</description>
<shuffle_answers>true</shuffle_answers>
<scoring_policy>keep_highest</scoring_policy>
<hide_results></hide_results>
<quiz_type>PRACTICE (ALSO IGNORED)</quiz_type>
<points_possible>2</points_possible>
<require_lockdown_browser>false</require_lockdown_browser>
<require_lockdown_browser_for_results>false</require_lockdown_browser_for_results>
<require_lockdown_browser_monitor>false</require_lockdown_browser_monitor>
<lockdown_browser_monitor_data/>
<show_correct_answers>true</show_correct_answers>
<anonymous_submissions>false</anonymous_submissions>
<could_be_locked>false</could_be_locked>
<time_limit></time_limit>
<allowed_attempts>1</allowed_attempts>
<one_question_at_a_time>false</one_question_at_a_time>
<cant_go_back>false</cant_go_back>
<available>false</available>
<one_time_results>false</one_time_results>
<show_correct_answers_last_attempt>false</show_correct_answers_last_attempt>
<only_visible_to_overrides>false</only_visible_to_overrides>
<module_locked>false</module_locked>
<assignment identifier="AID_Preliminary_Maths_Skills_Assessment_280375093">
<title>Preliminary_Maths_Skills_Assessment</title>
<due_at/>
<lock_at/>
<unlock_at/>
<module_locked>false</module_locked>
<workflow_state>unpublished</workflow_state>
<assignment_overrides>
</assignment_overrides>
<quiz_identifierref>Preliminary_Maths_Skills_Assessment_280375093</quiz_identifierref>
<allowed_extensions></allowed_extensions>
<has_group_category>false</has_group_category>
<points_possible>2</points_possible>
<grading_type>points</grading_type>
<all_day>false</all_day>
<submission_types>online_quiz</submission_types>
<position>52</position>
<turnitin_enabled>false</turnitin_enabled>
<vericite_enabled>false</vericite_enabled>
<peer_review_count>0</peer_review_count>
<peer_reviews>false</peer_reviews>
<automatic_peer_reviews>false</automatic_peer_reviews>
<anonymous_peer_reviews>false</anonymous_peer_reviews>
<grade_group_students_individually>false</grade_group_students_individually>
<freeze_on_copy>false</freeze_on_copy>
<omit_from_final_grade>false</omit_from_final_grade>
<intra_group_peer_reviews>false</intra_group_peer_reviews>
<only_visible_to_overrides>false</only_visible_to_overrides>
<post_to_sis>false</post_to_sis>
<moderated_grading>false</moderated_grading>
<grader_count>0</grader_count>
<grader_comments_visible_to_graders>true</grader_comments_visible_to_graders>
<anonymous_grading>false</anonymous_grading>
<graders_anonymous_to_graders>false</graders_anonymous_to_graders>
<grader_names_visible_to_final_grader>true</grader_names_visible_to_final_grader>
<anonymous_instructor_annotations>false</anonymous_instructor_annotations>
</assignment>
<assignment_group_identifierref>GID_Preliminary_Maths_Skills_Assessment_280375093</assignment_group_identifierref>
<assignment_overrides>
</assignment_overrides>
</quiz>​<br /><div>​

Any idea what could be the culprit, or how to diagnose the problem further?

[chriscas]

Hi @baptnz,

I moved this post over to the Developers Group area, as there are some more technical-minded people there than the general question forum.  One question I have myself is that you mentioned not seeing any meaningful difference in your generated file vs the Canvas exported one.  Would you be able to attach both files here?  Maybe it's something that doesn't appear meaningful but actually ends up being the key to getting things working.  I can't promise a solution, but I think the right set of eyes seeing this post might be able to spot the problem.

-Chris

[baptnz]

Thank you @chriscas , I'm attaching two .zip files: the original created with the exams package (debug.zip), and the one edited manually on Canvas and re-exported from there (reexport.zip).

The original debug.zip results in a quiz that has the wrong type (graded assessment instead of practice quiz) and the description field is empty.

Re-importing the reexported.zip file gives the expected results (correct type practice_quiz and non-empty description field), but looking at the XML files I see no difference besides the random character identifiers; it's quite puzzling for us.

Zip files hosted below, since the forum doesn't like zip or xml ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

http://nano-optics.ac.nz/canvas/debug.zip

http://nano-optics.ac.nz/canvas/reexport.zip

[chriscas]

Hi @baptnz,

Thanks for attaching the files.  Will definitely be helpful!  This might be a little weekend project for me to dive into if I have some time myself, and perhaps some other curious users here might be willing to take a look too.

-Chris

[chriscas]

Hi @baptnz,

I did a bit of investigating on this tonight, and while I cannot pinpoint the exact cause of the issue, I can say that it appears to have something to do with your quiz questions file.  If I replace that file with one that just has the basic skeleton structure exported by Canvas, and then import that into Canvas, it correctly makes a practice quiz with the description included.  Unfortunately, I'm not a super QTI expert, and that questions file is 30,000 lines long, so it's honestly too much for me to try to do much more with.  I hope this at least points you in the right direction (it's somewhat odd that an issue in the quiz questions file makes Canvas ignore certain things in the meta, but here we are...

-Chris

[baptnz]

Thank you for taking the time to investigate! This sounds promising – indeed I had not even tried changing the questions files, thinking it ought to be irrelevant – but unfortunately when I tried today I was unable to see the behaviour you report. Could you please share the questions file you use as replacement? I tried with the one reexported from Canvas, which works as part of the whole zip bundle, but it didn't change the import behaviour of the original bundle. Perhaps I missed some relevant change in the ID strings or something like that.

[chriscas]

Hi @baptnz,

I think this is the the one I verified uploaded fine with just replacing the questions file with basically the shell Canvas gives as an export of no questions.

-Chris