Forum .LRN Q&A: Changes in lors & lorsm

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 02/24/05 05:09 PM

Hello.

I´m Jonatan Tierno and I am working for the E-LANE project at the uc3m universiti, in Madrid. Currently I´m working on LORS in order to add the possibility to change the presentation format of a course.

I´m modifying the code to let the user choose which presentation to use for each course, and also creating a new presentation different from the original one, with no index visible on the left, and a toolbar at the bottom of the window.

I´ll start putting code on the cvs very soon, so that anyone interested can check it out. Comments & suggestions (and bugs, when there is some code :D) welcome.

I´ll be posting the changes I make.

Greeting
Jonatan Tierno (mailto:jonatan@inv.it.uc3m.es).

2: Re: Changes in lors & lorsm (response to 1)

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on 02/25/05 01:31 AM

Hi Jonatan,

That's a great new feature. Thanks very much for making it available.

One question I came across is how are you planning to know the available presentations that the admin is able to choose? Are you planning to hardcode those, or if I just add a lorsm/www/deliveryX directory your code would pick up that a new delivery environment has been added?

Thanks,

Ernie

3: Re: Changes in lors & lorsm (response to 1)

Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 02/25/05 09:06 AM

I have a suggestion regarding the navigation in the left frame. What do you think if we would display a little icon next to each node to indicate the content type of the link? It is much more usable that way since the user is informed about the what is coming next.

Existing meta-data to a node might also prove useful. If for instance we have to deal with a simple html page but we know that the relevant part of it is an embedded object like an applet, flash or movie.

What do you think?

Greetings,
Nima

4: Re: Changes in lors & lorsm (response to 1)

Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 03/01/05 02:48 PM

Question:

I am integrating an external application to run with a scorm course managed by lorsm. On user request, the application uses the students file-storage to create bookmarks. There application's state is stored together with the url of last page visited in lorsm. For instance

http://localhost/dotlrn/clubs/testclub/lorsm/delivery/record-view?man_id=6491&item_id=6498

Now the problem is that when I follow that link the page is displayed as a single page. But more preferable would be to display that page inside the typical frame with the navigation on the left. Any idea?

Greetings,
Nima

5: Re: Changes in lors & lorsm (response to 1)

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione on 03/01/05 11:05 PM

Hi Nima,

I think the problem is that you are storing in fs the URL that opens up in the content frame in LORS. Therefore if you jump straight into it, as you are experiencing, it will open up in a full screen without the delivery frames.

Maybe what you could do is to modify the code for the deliver/index.tcl. If I remember correctly, when you select a course to be delivered, the URL looks something like this:

http://localhost/dotlrn/clubs/testclub/lorsm/delivery/index?man_id=649

I believe the index page sets up the frames for the delivery environment and selects which URL to load up first in the content frame. Now, you could modify slightly the index.tcl so if a "go_url" variable is set, it gets delivered straight into the content frame. For instance:

http://localhost/dotlrn/clubs/testclub/lorsm/delivery/index?man_id=649&go_url=http://localhost/dotlrn/clubs/testclub/lorsm/delivery/record-view?man_id=6491&item_id=6498

Then when setting up the frames, the index page will load the http://localhost/dotlrn/clubs/testclub/lorsm/delivery/record-view?man_id=6491&item_id=6498 in the content frame.

I hope that helps,

Ernie

6: Re: Changes in lors & lorsm (response to 1)

Posted by Jonatan Tierno on 03/03/05 01:10 PM

Hello all. Sorry it took me so long to answer.

Ernie asked in the first answer how the system knows what presentation formats are available. THey are not hardcoded, but it is not transparent either. the data is stored in the database, in a new table called lors_available_presentation_formats, that contains an id, the pretty name of the presentation, and the folder that contains it.

About the index issue, in the presentation format I am currently working on, there will be no index in the same window. There will only be a small frame with buttons. One of these will be the index, which will open in a new window. There will be also buttons for next and previous page. But we are still working on the design.

greetings

Jonatan.

7: Re: Changes in lors & lorsm (response to 1)

Posted by dennis sacks on 12/20/05 04:35 AM

I saw your post from Feb 2005 about adding code to allow the user choose which presentation to use for each course. I am trying to make use of this feature - but when I the presentation format "with bottom navigation bar" I get a bad URL for the course under Learning Materials. It says 'file not found' if I click on it. I am just curious if there is a fix for this, or if not what files I might start looking in to figure out what is wrong.

Also, if I want to add my own presentation format - how would I do that?

I would greatly appreciate any help you can give me,