SIF enabled applications

[penfold_99]

Thanks for the advice, as I say, I am a glutton for punishment so I do agree with you there. My point is that I wish to use GlassFish in the end to support my Agents as servlets with timing events via JMS to each of the servlets to trigger SIF messaging. I realize there will be methods to process the SIF messages within the library but I do not want to by-pass the doPost() entry points etc created by GlassFish by using a separate library, which I expect are also in there. Also there is a certain amount of satisfaction once something challenging comes together!

 

One thing to take into account is SIF is asynchronous, you will send a SIF message requesting an object (LearnerPersonal for example) you will need to loop sending SIF_GetMessage to see if the SIF Data object has been returned, then you will be able to react to the data you receive.

 

Due to the asynchronous nature you dont know how long it will be before the data is returned.

[bantonia]

I think Threads should take care of that.

[RonK]

Skipped a few pages in between as I wanted to get to the SOAP and WSDL like the specification was teasing!

 

Overall I agree with the ideals it sounds good but as a programmer I don't particularly want to start from scratch having to interpret accurately most of the 283 pages before I got to the disappointing statement. Currently there are, as far as I know, no open source libraries, certified or otherwise in any programming language to create SIF messages. I tried to install OpenZIS yesterday as a test site and eventually came to a brick wall. There were also comments on GitHub that OpenZIS is no longer developed, how accurate that is I personally do not know, I may be passing on mis-information. I would be very happy to be stand corrected. So with ZIT server not working so nothing to test against, I am reluctant to spend the time and effort to move away from something I already have working via SOAP albeit not to the same ideals as SIF. As for other vendors, everyone seems to be keeping their own developments regarding SIF very close to their chests as it is a commercially viable product. Open specification is one thing but open source is quite another factor which needs to be addressed to enable the proliferation in use of the specification.

 

Two points.

 

1. SIF & SOAP

 

The now SIF Staff-internal infamous quote on page 235 in Appendix C.9 of the SIF Specification came as a shock to me personally (and I'm the SIF CTO) because it was totally outdated and should never have been carried into the latest release. A corrected version is in the SIF v2.6 US release (now out for SIF member review), although we really

need to roll back the change into the SIF v2.5 specification. This was a great catch ... many thanks.

 

The new text reads:

 

C.9 SIF, SOAP and Web Services

 

With the addition of Web Service support in the SIF v2.5 specification, it is now possible to write a “pure” SIF web service which:

 Supports a defined SIF Application WSDL interface for receiving asynchronous, Events, Requests and Response methods over the SOAP transport

 Acts as a web client of the a set of ZIS web services, which also support SIF-specified WSDL interfaces over the SOAP transport, and which together encapsulate the ZIS functionality

 Can seamlessly and transparently interoperate with other SIF applications, whether they are web services themselves, or pre-existing SIF v2.x HTTP/S based applications.

 

The details of this support are contained in the SIF Global Web Services Implementation Specification volume of this release.

 

 

2. SIF & Open Source

 

The former Pearson SIF Agent Developer Kit has been made into an open source project at: (whoops ... I just joined, so I can't post the link directly - do a Google search of "open source SIF ADK)

 

While this was originally tied to SIF US v2.4 (and predates the release of the SOAP transport) it is relatively independent of the data model, can be used to allow an application to interoperate with all existing deployed SIF applications, and there is some support provided through the community.

 

Hopefully this proves helpful to some folks on this list.

 

RonK

[RonK]

You were unfortunately given the wrong end of an outdated stick. Our bad. The new text (corrected in the release currently out the SIF membership for review reads):

 

C.9 SIF and Web Services

 

With the addition of Web Service support in the SIF v2.5 specification, it is now possible to write a “pure” SIF web service which:

 

 Supports a defined SIF Application WSDL interface for receiving asynchronous, Events, Requests and Response methods over the SOAP transport

 Acts as a web client of the a set of ZIS web services, which also support SIF-specified WSDL interfaces over the SOAP transport, and which together encapsulate the ZIS functionality

 Can seamlessly and transparently interoperate with other SIF applications, whether they are web services themselves, or pre-existing SIF v2.x HTTP/S based applications.

 

The details of this support are contained in the SIF Global Web Services Implementation Specification volume of this release.

 

Sincere apologies for the confusion. This was an outdated paragraph that should have been flagged. Great catch! (and thanks)

[bantonia]

Cheers,

 

I will delve into the innards to see what I can find.

 

Regards

[penfold_99]

@bantonia

 

Just so you know Ron is the CTO of the SIF Association.

[bantonia]

@bantonia

 

Just so you know Ron is the CTO of the SIF Association.

 

Yes, I saw that in his post. Glad to be of service to spot something to add to the errata, annoying I know but another pair of eyes is always useful.

 

By the way, I went to look at the SIF UK 1.4 specification and found the WSDL for the SOAP implementation hidden away behind a username/password pair, is this going to always be the case? I have the 2.5 version, which I assume has the definitions for the US Data Objects.

 

Regards

[bantonia]

Creating a SIMS report, if you include yourself in 3rd party reporting, shows you can extract the SIF Ref Id fields for a number of items such as student, aspect and class etc but not all entries have a value for that field. Is there a way to kick start the population of these fields? What is the criteria within SIMS .net which will add an entry into the SIF Ref Id field for let's say a student?

[penfold_99]

The only way I know of is via sims business object if you want them stored in the sims database or you can create your own and store them in a db and link them to sims.net localid

[bantonia]

Thought that might be the case, the plan was to extract the data I require and save it to an external database, the only problem is if there are changes then they will only be available on the next update of the intermediate database.

 

I did discover last night the "Data Change Tracking Management" settings in SIMS .net, but when enabled the following message began to appear in the application event log.

 

The activated proc '[sims].[db_pia_sb_RunScheduledJob]' running on queue 'sims.sims.ScheduledJobQueue' output the following: 'Cannot execute as the database principal because the principal "SIMSScheduledTaskUser" does not exist, this type of principal cannot be impersonated, or you do not have permission.'

 

I expect some sort of patch needs to be run as well to enable tracking of any changes, certainly the "SIMSScheduledTaskUser" does not exist.

[penfold_99]

@bantonia

 

AFAIK its only available on 2008 SQL server.

The error message is due to a feature of SQL server being disabled but Im not sure what feature SIMS.net is requiring