Navigation menu

[hhoyt1]

Any new program or app connected to Canvas automatically populates in the "seen" part of the Navigation menu for each class. I have to reset my navigation menu several times a year because there are new programs I don't want my students to see in their menu because it confuses them when new things show up beyond the three we use. Several times a year I need to drag programs or pages down into the hidden area of the navigation. Can you change the default to hidden for this? 

[Chris_Hofer]

@hhoyt1 ...

Sometimes when third-party LTI external apps are installed/integrated with Canvas (most of the time installed at the Canvas account level rather than the course level), they can be configured so that those tools are hidden in the course navigation bar by default.  (Note: Some external LTI tools, even though they do not have the crossed-out eye icon next to them on the course navigation...they are still hidden from students.)  For your course(s), have you considered having a "sandbox" course where you build out your course content (including those items in your nav bar that you want hidden), and then importing (copying) content from that course?  This *should* copy your course navigation the way you want it so you don't have to keep hiding things all the time.

I'm not sure if any of this will be helpful for you, but I wanted to share this info with you just in case...for what it's worth.  Looking forward to hearing back from you soon.

[James]

@hhoyt1 

Most of the third party tools set tool to be visible because why wouldn't you want to install their great biology app for all of your history courses?

If you use their configuration, you're going to get it installed for everyone.

If you install it yourself with your configuration, you can tell it to not be visisble.

The Importing Extended Tool Configurations documentation explains the XML configuration file. If you scroll down a little bit, there is a "Disabled by Default" section where we can see this line. It defaults to enabled.

        <lticm:property name="default">disabled</lticm:property>

Now, let's pretend that you didn't know this before you installed one of these apps.

In theory, you can use the API to edit the settings. I haven't tried this myself, but it should work.

If you look at the create an external tool endpoint you see that there is an option for course_navigation[default] that says the tool will not appear in the course navigation until a teacher explicitly enables it.

That sounds exactly like the option you want to set. But you don't want to create an external tool, you want to fix one that's already there.

Scroll down a little more to the edit an existing tool endpoint. It takes the same parameters that create does.

If you know the ID of the external tool (you can get it with the list external tools endpoint), then you can disable it globally.

That's a lot faster than going through and changing it for every course.