Opening Concourse in a New Window (Canvas)

This article will be most useful for IT/IS staff and Canvas admins.

Overview

If your institution uses Canvas LMS and has integrated Concourse via LTI 1.3, you may have noticed an uptick in “ID token: State not found” errors. This error means that the user’s information has not been successfully transmitted from Canvas to our middleware partner Apidapter. As a result, the user and course information can’t be sent to Concourse to display the correct syllabus, create the user’s account, or register the user for the course. This error is related to a combination of device- and browser-specific security and privacy settings as well as third-party cookie settings. The most effective way to minimize these errors is by updating the placement of Concourse to open in a new window.

Before You Begin

Your Concourse integration may have more than one placement in Canvas. If users are able to add Concourse to modules on their own, they have the option to load Concourse in a new tab when adding Concourse. If Concourse appears in every course’s course navigation menu, then changes you make to that placement will impact the Concourse link across the Canvas account. 

A user must have Canvas admin permissions to make adjustments to your institution’s Concourse integration. Note that a new installation of Concourse is not required–you can make changes to an existing installation of Concourse by editing its Paste JSON. Any changes to the existing installation may necessitate an update to your middleware adapter. We encourage you to reach out to Concourse if you need assistance or aren’t familiar with Paste JSON.

Updating Paste JSON

Updating Paste JSON for an existing installation of Concourse only requires the addition of one comma and one line of text. If you make other changes to Paste JSON, it is possible that your installation of Canvas may present errors.

To update Paste JSON to open Canvas in a new window:

1. In your Canvas instance, select Admin > Developer Keys.
2. In the list of existing Developer Keys, locate Concourse. Your institution may have named it something else (for example, Syllabus, eSyllabus, Concourse 1.3, Apidapter). 
3. Select the edit icon to the right of the Concourse Developer Key.
4. On the following page, the Configuration Method should be set to Manual Entry. Open the dropdown menu and select Paste JSON.
5. The information that was used to install Concourse is automatically populated in the LTI 1.3 Configuration (JSON) text field. Scroll down this text field until you locate “placement”:"course-navigation”.
6. In the next row, add a comma after “message_type”:"LtiResourceLinkRequest” (“message_type”:"LtiResourceLinkRequest”,).
7. Add a new line and insert "windowTarget":"_blank",. We recommend that you add this text in manually to avoid copying any background style elements that could prevent the placement from updating correctly.
   
   
   
   
   
   
8. After adding the comma and additional line of text, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Save.
   

Making this change to the JSON shouldn’t result in any changes other than Concourse opening in a new tab in your users’ browsers. In other words, if you observe any other changes to your Concourse system’s behavior, you will need to review the JSON to ensure that you didn’t accidentally incorporate any other changes.

Best Practices and Recommendations

Although the functionality and appearance of Concourse will not appear differently to users, it is always a good idea to inform instructors and students when external tools open in a new tab. If users are not expecting this type of launch, they may think Concourse is not working correctly. We advise that you clearly socialize the new tab launch with your end users as soon as the update is made and prior to the start of the next term to make syllabus editing and viewing go more smoothly.

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