Using API to change Assignments to use Plagiarism Framework

[bdaley4]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to use the API to change an assignment settings from using Turnitin as an external tool, to using Canvas file upload and plagiarism review.

We have the Turnitin Plagiarism Framework set up at an account level in our Canvas instances. I'm running api requests through a NodeJS library, using a pre-generated Canvas token for Auth.

I'm using a PUT on the /api/v1/courses/<course_id>/assignments/<assignment_id> endpoint to update the assignment settings.

The JSON data I'm attaching is:

{
    "assignment[submission_types][]": "online_upload",
    "assignment[turnitin_enabled]": "true"
}‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

The PUT returns a success, however, when I look at the settings of the assignment in Canvas, the 'plagiarism review' part hasn't been set:

 

Has anyone else had any luck in changing the 'plagiarism review' section of the assignment settings through the API? Is there something that I'm missing?

We've got 100s (if not 1000s) of assignments that need the settings changed to the plagiarism review tool, and I'm dreading having to do this manually.

Thanks for your help!

Brad

[bdaley4]

So it looks like the Plagiarism Review settings get handled through an LTI request on the front end, and that creates some settings somewhere. There is also a bug when you change the assignment settings through the API, it will remove any Plagiarism Review settings you've added through the front-end.

Has anyone had any luck triggering a front-end LTI request through a script?

[James]

bdaley 

I have written a couple of things that initiate an LTI launch through a script. One is to initiate a request to Roll-Call Attendance to generate a report of attendance for all courses for the last week. Another is to initiate an Arc session so that I can access their API, although I never finished anything substantial with it.

I have not done anything with TurnItIn or other plagiarism frameworks. That means that I'm shooting in the dark when I give advice since I don't know exactly how it handles it.

Anyway, to launch the LTI, what you need to do is the Get a sessionless launch url for an external tool endpoint of the External Tools API.

The process I used for Roll Call went something like this.

1. Get the sessionless launch URL, it hopefully gives you an URL
2. Get the URL returned by the sessionless launch, it gives you an HTML page with a FORM
3. Post the form information to the form action
4. This will redirect you somewhere and depending on what you're doing and what software you're using (I'm using Node to do this), you may need to manually follow the redirect instead of letting it automatically do it.
5. You're now logged into your LTI, be sure to save any cookies you need to to make it work.

One thing you might check before you go to all that trouble though, is open up an assignment that you want to change the settings for inside the web interface. Then open up the developer tools (normally F12) and go to the network tab. Tell the logs to persist or preserve.

Change the settings for the Plagiarism review and then click Update

The next item in your network log in the developer tools will be a PUT to update the settings. Under the Headers portion, you should be able to scroll down and see the Request Headers that has the form data you sent. Look for things related to plagiarism review. We don't have that enabled, so I can't see any when I try this, I just see things like turnitin_enabled and vericite_enabled, both of which are 0.

Okay, I did find one item that might be it: similarityDetectionTool: "None". You're probably wanting something other than none. If it was something other than "None", there might be some other settings that you could use here as well.

Again, this is the portion I can't test, so it's possible that you've figured out how to enable that portion and then you need to launch an LTI to set the configuration parameters. If that's the case, then the first part may be helpful.

[nschutz]

bdaley 

What did you end up doing to update the Plagiarism review tool? I am in the same boat and here is the discussion on anther thread if you scroll to the bottom. Developer Tools #2 - Update a course nickname with the API 

 @James  

Is this the alternative to using JWT?

[James]

This is a similar approach to what I did when I couldn't get JWT to work, but that doesn't mean it's a replacement for it. The case I was talking about in the other discussion was with Arc (now Canvas Studio). I think that now there are developer keys available for Studio and so that might make JWT possible whereas it wasn't at the time. At the time, I needed a token so I could make API calls as the user and you could do that if you launched Studio from within Arc, but I couldn't figure out how to do it otherwise.

[afromero2]

Using blazemeter, I have registered the process for edit and saving a "assignment" in Canvas.
I saw a "PUT" request to the assignment endpoint ( /api/v1/courses/{course}/assignments/{id assignment} ); at the bottom, this request sends information about the similarity tool (or any LTI).

 I'm using PHP code to activate Ouriginal plagiarism in an assignment.

The result: