Getting an assignment submission as a file

Two students who are working at automating processing of degree projects wanted to be able to get the PDF file that a user had uploaded as a draft of their thesis. They will then parse this file to extract information.

However, they ran into problems getting the file (without being logged in and using a browser).  Inspired by https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/3581 Links to an external site.  I decided that a script that could take the course_id, assignment_id, and user_id (of the student who submitted the assignment) would be useful. After some success with separate programs, I produced a new program that does just what is desired. An example is:

xxxx> ./get_submission_as_file.py 2139 24565 11185
'Wed May 9 23:25:00 2018'
'Wed May 9 23:25:01 2018'
'\n--DONE--\n\n'
xxxx> ls -als file_916579_test_document4-1.pdf
88 -rw-r--r-- 1 maguire nucmed 90089 May 9 23:25 file_916579_test_document4-1.pdf

The file's display name is test_document4-1.pdf and it has file_id 916579, hence the generated name above.

The program is: Download get_submission_as_file.py