Forum .LRN Q&A: Ladies and Gentelmen: LORSm v0.4d!

You rock!

Al

Greetings,
Nima

this is a cool piece of software. Congratulations on this and your thesis!

Now, I got a couple of questions for the "future" of LORS, while working with it a little bit.

- Will it be possible to detach LORS from file storage in the future so that LORS folders do not show up in the file storage view ?

- Will it be possible to add versioning (so you can upload a new version of the course which creates a new version of each file in the course and adds/deletes new/old files) ?

Looking forward to more on this front !

Bulk delete of anything from the CR is going to be kind of slow. It doesn't any any overhead above deleting from the content repository. That said, I don't see any reason LORs needs to work on top of file-storage, especially with the new CR Tcl API.

I think using FS to do the file management of all LORS related resources and files is optimal. Even if now we have CR TCL API, I really don't see a reason for LORS to have its own interface when it could easily reuse the FS one. Additionally, we get all the perks from FS: webdav support, versioning, permissions, etc.

On version 0.1, we even were using file-storage's template for delivery. Now we aren't, but still I find it easy (and useful) to rely on FS for file management.

Maybe with time and when LORS gets a bit more specilized either on content delivery or as a repository, it will make more sense to migrate to a propietary way to handling file, but for now, FS does all we need.

<blockquote> Will it be possible to detach LORS from file storage in
the future so that LORS folders do not show up in the
file storage view ?
</blockquote>

Yes, Giancarlo has mentioned this to me before.

Maybe instead of using the FS community/class FS root folder, we can create a new one for LORS. That will prevent students to see the folders and files on the FS interface.

How about that?

<blockquote> Will it be possible to add versioning (so you can upload a
  new version of the course which creates a new version of
  each file in the course and adds/deletes new/old files) ?
</blockquote>

This will be the ultimate feature.

I'm sure that it's possible but it might be really tricky since you might need to keep track of all changes in files and versions.

Right now, course are acs_object and maybe they should be cr_items so versioning will be a bit easier.

If anyone has suggestions/experience about this, please do share them here so we can see how we can go about this.

Thanks,

Ernie

You can get rid of the <master> template in your-acs-root-folder/templates/lorsm-default.adp. You can customize it to use your own template or just get it of it all together.

Let me know if that does the trick for you.

Ernie

You can download the version that works here:

http://weg.ee.usyd.edu.au/people/ernieg/files/file-storage.tgz

Hopefully, file-storage can be updated on CVS shortly.

Thanks,

Ernie

Yesterday the e-lane fellows (Luis de la Fuente in particular) has shown me a potential security problem with LORS 0.4d. If a random striker (student) knows the exact URL for certain administration pages, he could potentially get access and change some of the LORS' course parameters (disable/enable, shared, etc).

I just committed the changes to prevent this to happen. Basically added:

# Permissions
dotlrn::require_user_admin_community -user_id $user_id -community_id $community_id

Additionally:

- Exporting/Importing courses with "()" characters on them, now are working (bug

- Curly brackets causing error in menu.tcl (Bug # 2100): fixed.

- LORS not displaying CSS with HTML pages: fixed

If you are using LORS, it is higly recommended for you to check out the new changes. No DB upgrade required.

Thanks,

Ernie

That's great news!

You might want to talk to Jonatan Tierno Alvite (https://openacs.org/forums/user-history?user_id=195386) and/or Abelardo Pardo (https://openacs.org/forums/user-history?user_id=49412) from the e-lane project since they mentioned to me before that they wanted to do the i18 for LORS.

Thanks,

Ernie

Does that mean that it will be available on the translation
server such that we can also localize it into DE_de ?

Just an idea:
I'm afraid you should refer to a class, the installation we have here doesn't show up in communities, just in classes, right under manage applets.
Does that apply ?

Greetings
Michele

1. ad_html_text_convert didn't allow text/xml..so this had to get fixed. I will commit that to cvs

2. default-lorsm.tcl needed a little tuning:

} elseif { [string equal "text/xml" $content(mime_type)]} {
cr_write_content -revision_id $content(revision_id)
}

Now everything works just perfect.

Some else just pointed to me that I have missed your posting here. My apologies.

<blockquote> what do you think about a little improvement on the
navigation frame to display an Icon with the content
type of the file it is referencing?
</blockquote>

Hmm... although nice, this could be a bit cumbersome.

This would require to change a few small changes in the delivery/menu.tcl. The menu.tcl is the page we use to generate the "index page" for the course based on the ims_item that it contains.

Now, the problem here is that ims_items have really little idea what their content is. So you'll have to find out what that is by searching for the ims resource reference (which usually points to a file or URL). In the ims_cp_resources table you'll have the href which will point out to the actual file (or URL) that is meant to be loaded when hitting the ims_item, but since an ims_resource could potentially "enclose" many different files, you will have to search the ims_cp_files table to get the actual cr_item id for that file.

Once you have the cr_item, you can find out what the mime type is and then add an "<img src="pdf.jpg>" after the ims_cp_item title.

So, yeah, it's possible but requires a bit of fiddling.

<blockquote> Also one question: Is it possible for an item in the
manifest to reference a URL in the internet instead
of a resource?
</blockquote>

Yeah, that's not a problem. You can have an entire course that is based on URL and not a single file in the resources.

Thanks,

Ernie

Nima, here's an example

<manifest xmlns="http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imscp_v1p1" xmlns:imsmd="http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_v1p2" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" identifier="MANIFEST-8236AF77-88E6-8E6E-CEDC-B301827FE87F" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imscp_v1p1 imscp_v1p1.xsd http://www.imsglobal.org/xsd/imsmd_v1p2 imsmd_v1p2p2.xsd">
  <organizations default="ORG-4396F8E8-EB84-246F-7FDE-C39985F68086">
    <organization identifier="ORG-4396F8E8-EB84-246F-7FDE-C39985F68086" structure="hierarchical">
      <title>Organization</title>
      <item identifier="ITEM-DB63FDB5-9FA0-5449-D172-BD99F2B5526C" identifierref="RES-30036DFA-FCA1-39CC-BE46-D8C6665A9A5F" isvisible="true">
        <title>Google URL</title>
      </item>
    </organization>
  </organizations>
  <resources>
    <resource identifier="RES-30036DFA-FCA1-39CC-BE46-D8C6665A9A5F" type="webcontent" href="http://google.com" />
  </resources>
</manifest>