lms-api

LMS API

This project provides a wrapper around the Instructure Canvas API.

Installation

To install, add lms-api to your Gemfile:

    gem "lms-api"

Configuration

Your app must tell the gem which model is used to represent the authentication state. For instance, if you're using ActiveRecord, you might have an Authentication model, which encapsulates a temporary API token.

class Authentication < ActiveRecord::Base
  # token: string
end

Then, you tell the gem about this model:

LMS::Canvas.auth_state_model = Authentication

This allows the gem to transparently refresh the token when the token expires, and do so in a way that respects multiple processes all trying to do so in parallel.

Usage

To use the API wrapper, instantiate a LMS::Canvas instance with the url of the LMS instance you want to communicate with, as well as the current authentication object, and (optionally) a hash of options to use when refreshing the API token.

Require the gem: require "lms_api"

auth = Authentication.first # or however you are storing global auth state
api = LMS::Canvas.new("http://your.canvas.instance", auth,
        client_id: "...",
        client_secret: "..."
        redirect_uri: "..."
        refresh_token: "...")

You can get the URL for a given LMS interface via the ::lms_url class method:

params = {
  id: id,
  course_id: course_id,
  controller: "foo",
  account_id: 1,
  all_dates: true,
  other_param: "foobar"}

url = LMS::Canvas.lms_url("GET_SINGLE_ASSIGNMENT", params)

Once you have the URL, you can send the request by using api_*_request methods:

• api_get_request(url, headers={})
• api_post_request(url, payload, headers={})
• api_delete_request(url, headers={})
• api_get_all_request(url, headers={})
• api_get_blocks_request(url, headers={}, &block)

The last two are convenience methods for fetching multiple pages of data. The api_get_all_request method returns all rows in a single array. The api_get_blocks_request method yields each "chunk" of data to the block.