Testing developer sites on mobile

[kfeldt]

We are developing a service that responds to links in student messages (conversations) and would like to see how this performs using the Canvas mobile app The mobile app API from 2013 states that the 'conversations' endpoint is supported - so we need to see how the native app responds to our links. We can't seem to find any way to point the mobile app to the URL for our staging server. Is it even possible to point the mobile app to our company's server?

[stuart_ryan]

Hi  @kfeldt ,

There is a way you can do this, in the search box when logging into the mobile app, in the search box, rather than doing a search, enter the URL of any Canvas server (Test/Beta/Hosted etc). That should allow you to log in to the instance. 

Hope that helps, and please let me know how you go!

Kind Regards,
Stuart

[kfeldt]

Thank you. 

I have tried that --- receiving 'the server you entered  is not authorized for this app.'  The mobile version of Canvas that I downloaded from from Google play store a few months ago  --- but I don't see any settings on the application that seems to be relevant.

To the best of our knowledge, is there an administrator setting on the Canvas server that opens up mobile access?

[stuart_ryan]

Hi  @kfeldt ‌,

No worries at all, thank you for the extra info. This one has me scratching my head so I have shared this with the Canvas Coach Mobile guru's to have a look at this and see if they have any thoughts.

Hope that helps!

Stuart

[kfeldt]

Thanks - should anyone ask - my mobile is Galaxy S4 running android 5.0.1.   I appreciate your interest.

[rseilham]

Hi  @kfeldt ‌, 

Are you trying to get the Canvas app to open from your native app or the other way around? I'm trying to get a better sense of what you are trying to accomplish here. Thanks!

[kfeldt]

We are developing a mobile app to streamline mobile acquired images for streamlined exchange and annotation within a study group (think exchanging handwritten solutions for problems math, chemistry, mech engineering...) with no asset upload/download. We test our mobile app against our own installation of a canvas instance at http://canvas.electricbook.net.

 All testing between our mobile app and the test server works fine, and there are no problems we have in logging into our canvas server from a desktop app (or from our mobile app).

Since the installation of our LTI app modifies the teacher landing page, I wanted to see what things looked like if I used the 'official' canvas mobile app (for both teacher and student from Google Play), and simply logged into canvas.electricbook.net, but I can only get the error message I mentioned earlier.

So I am wondering if https is required, or if there is some server configuration setting we're missing, or if mobile apps work only with a specific type of deployment.

[rseilham]

Interesting. I'm not 100% sure this will work, but I did notice a certificate issue when trying to connect to canvas.electricbook.net in a web browser. This "could" be causing issues with the app using your URL. I'll need to look into this some more but was curious about the error. 

[kfeldt]

Thanks - the certificate issue is the only other variable that may be the issue. We probably won't get to this for a couple of days (still fine tuning our wiring with the conversations API) - but once we give the certificate installation a shot, we'll post our findings.

Thanks again for your help!

(PS Sorry it takes so long for me to respond - apparently using a gmail interface to respond to these posts doesn't work, and I need to log into a specific box - that isn't readily accessible during the day - before the single sign-on feature lets me 'in).

[rseilham]

Thanks for the update. I'm curious what you find out! 

[kfeldt · Accepted solution]

Adding the certificate did not help - 'An unexpected error occurred. the server you entered is not authorized for this app'.

But I did find a github posting from 2013 that confirmed my earlier suspicion:

"The mobile apps only work with the Instructure hosted instances of Canvas" :

Android Mobile App is not Connecting · Issue #334 · instructure/canvas-lms · GitHub 

Didn't see anything explaining that on the google play store that mentioned that. Oh well.

[rseilham]

Good find. Not exactly the answer you wanted, but at least you now have a reason for it not working.