This is a discord bot that has two main features, canvas upcoming assignments and homework questions.

• Upcoming assignments and discussions topics are fetched from canvas API and accessible to users via the !thisweek and !nextweek commands, this displays the module name, assignment name, due date and points (if available).
• Homework questions allows users to post pictures of homework questions/answers (after solutions posted) to chat using the !hw command.

This project should work with node.js version 10 upwards but is mainly tested on version 14 LTS.

# Install dependencies
npm install --no-optional
# Setup sqlite3 database
npm run init-db
# Copy example config
npm run init-config

Configuration of the bot is done in the .config.json file, there is an example of this file in .config.example.json

{
  "api": String, // The base URL of the canvas API
  "course_filter": String?, // A regex filter for course names retrieved from canvas /courses
  "sam_course_filter": String?, // A regex filter for course names retrieved from SAM
  "sam_blocklist": [String]?, // List of courses to not fetch assignments for from SAM
  "question_directory": String?, // Relative path to directory containing questions
  "answer_directory": String?, // Relative path to directory containing answers
  "prefix": String?, // The bot command prefix (default "ca!"), its what is put before commands e.g. "ca!help"
  "overrides": [AssignmentOverride]?, // A list of assignment overrides
  "automated_assignments": [AutomatedAssignment]?, // List of automated assignment channels
}

/** AssignmentOverride
* Defines extra assignments that will be shown in output
*/
{
  "offset": Number, // Offset in ms from start of week (monday 00:00) for when assignment is due (ms)
  "course": String, // Name of course assignment is for
  "name": String, // Name of assignment
  "points": Number, // Number of points assignment is worth
}

/** AutomatedAssignment
* Defines channel that will automatically be send upcoming assignments
*/
{
  "offset": Number, // Offset from start of week of when to send message (ms)
  "channel": String, // Snowflake ID of channel to send to
}

In order to use !hw you will need to do two things: add screenshots of the questions to the questions/ directory (the directory will soon be configurable) and create a JSON tree in homework.json.

While not directly required, you can alternatively add textual representations contained entirely in homework.json, if you do wish to add screenshots then this can be done by placing .png files into the questions/ directory. Files must be named to match their equivalent path in homework.json, explained below. The questions/ directory should not contain sub directories of screenshots, as they will be missed by the code. An example file name: 111.1.1.a This corresponds to the question 1a of exercise 1 from module 111. To represent this in homework.json:

homework.json contains a nested structure of nodes, each representing a path that can be taken from the parent node. Usual tree stuff. Each node takes the form:

data HomeworkNode = HomeworkNode {
  alt_desc :: String,
  image :: Bool,
  solution :: Bool,
  children :: {String: HomeworkNode}
}

The solution field is used by !answer to determine if a question is valid for sending (More below). If any field is empty, it will not be sent. For example, if we have the JSON:

{
  "children": {
    "1": {
      "alt_desc": "Example 1",
      "image": true,
      "children": {
        "a": {
          "image": true
        },
        "b": {
          "alt_desc": "Example 1b: What is the meaning of life?"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

If we call !hw 1 we get a message containing "Example 1", the image called "1.png", and a list of sub-section names, "Subs: a, b". If we call !hw 1 a we get a message containing only the image called "1.a.png", since that node has not alt_desc or children properties. If we call !hw 1 b we get a message containing only "Example 1b: What is the meaning of life?", since that node only has an alt_desc.

Similar to !homework, this command returns screenshots of answers to previous questions. It requires a path to a question with solution: True. It allows all the special syntax if !homework.

The bot requires 2 API keys, for canvas and discord. These are set via environment variables (you can also use dotenv).

DISCORD_TOKEN=Discord bot token
CANVAS_TOKEN=Canvas API token
SAM_TOKEN=SAM session token

With these variables set you can run the bot using

node .