Canvas To Do List - How to delete years worth of reminders

[AdrianPriest]

My to do list has tasks for assignments dating back years.  All because I a a course leader and have access to the Canvas topics to monitor them.  It's pointless having the reminders there, especially dating back years.  

I've deleted tasks for almost an hour and it looked useful.  I go to another page, return to the dashboard and the dross is still there with another 95 tasks hidden. 

Where do I go and delete a range of tasks, say back until last semester?  What's the point in wasting my time when it reminds me to mark student work who graduated years ago?  A total waste of my time and renders the delete function useless. 

It's reminding me to grade tasks with 0 points and no due dates for modules that I'm observing.

Or at least can we hide the not fit for purpose tool?

I'm sure there will be another answer saying it can't be done.  Maybe another thing the developers can ignore.

Thanks in advance. 

[jerry_nguyen · Accepted solution]

@AdrianPriest 

Yes this can be done (not through the UI), you can delete Todo items in bulk through API. You will need to know some basic coding. The easiest is to use VBA in Excel:

1. First, list all todo items on a spreadsheet by calling this API Endpoint: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/users.html#method.users.todo_items
2. In each of the responses, you will find the "ignore or ignore_permanently" URL, create a list of those URLs then send "DELETE"  requests to them.

If you need help writing this code, feel free to send me a PM.

However, if you need to oversee multiple courses on Canvas, you might want to request your Canvas's Admin to set you as "Admin" for a sub-account or department that you're managing. This will give you access to view all courses (within that sub-account) without having to add yourself as "Teacher" (which will populate the Todo list)