Replace RCE content with a new content from LTI deep linking response

[RuslanDauhiala]

I'm using editor_button placement to embed some text into a Rich Content Editor via LTI Deep Linking. Is there any way to replace an old RCE's content with a new text coming from LTI response? Right now I'm only able to append a new text to existing one.

[chriscas]

Hi @RuslanDauhiala,

Since nobody else has responded in the last week, I just wanted to at least give my perspective as a Canvas admin.  I have never seen an LTI tool overwrite all of the content in the RCE using the editor button placement.  I don't want to say it's impossible, because I'm not sure, but I think that would really be unexpected behavior based on the way all of the LTI apps I have installed right now work.

I hope this info helps guide your potential development!

-Chris

[wyelearning]

Hiya @RuslanDauhiala,

You can do this in a LTI 1.1 tool by returning a special type for your content item. If you send this back from your tool:

{
  "@context": "http://purl.imsglobal.org/ctx/lti/v1/ContentItem",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "lti_replace",
      "mediaType": "text/html",
      "text": "<h1>All your editor content</h1>....",
      "placementAdvice": { "presentationDocumentTarget": "embed" }
    }
  ]
}

Then it will replace all the existing content in the editor. By passing in the variable $com.instructure.Editor.contents in the custom launch parameters the tool can take the current contents, modify them and pass them back to the editor.

You can see this all in action in a simple app we built that allows table of contents to be automatically generated for long documents based off the headings in them.

https://www.eduappcenter.com/apps/6373

[RuslanDauhiala]

Thank you @wyelearning for your response!

Yeap - I use $com.instructure.Editor.contents to pass an RTE context, but I'm using LTI1.3:

  'https://purl.imsglobal.org/spec/lti-dl/claim/content_items': [
    {
      'type': 'html',
      'html': 'New RTE content<br><br>'
    }
  ],

will see if I can pass "lti_replace" type instead of "html".

[matthew_buckett]

I'm not sure this will work with LTI 1.3 as it looks like the code supporting it is only working for the LTI 1.1 JSON:

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/8b620d705c1370df3b95ae5a73e2b136fce01ac1/ui/shared/ti...

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/8b620d705c1370df3b95ae5a73e2b136fce01ac1/packages/can...

[RuslanDauhiala]

Thank you Matt!

[Twelve]

Hello @RuslanDauhiala, have you found the solution for LTI 1.3?

[matthew_buckett]

Good news, Instructure have recently added support for LTI 1.3 tools to be able to completely replace the contents of the editor window.

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/commit/c1f18b87743b50293a5997118d4c47f9d84224ac