bantonia

Worked out my own solution, does not touch any of the links above. Meta courses are just a bonus. What I have written is 2 Java libraries, a RMI server and a client with an intermediate MySQL database. The RMI server runs on a machine that has SIMS and Java installed. It also has to have the path to the directory containing the CommandReporter.exe tool put into the System environment "Path". One problem that may be encountered is that sometimes port 1099 has already been taken by another process, stop that process, start the RMI server then restart the process, it will get another port assigned to it. Within SIMS, a user which has access to the SIMS data, not directly to the database I might add, but importantly also to "Third Party Reporting". Three SIMS reports are needed, one to get student data, another for teachers and lastly one to get the id's of members and supervisors of classes along with the class details. One other point, all users needed to have their login usernames within a SIMS user defined field. The glue/client runs on a Linux box via cron which in turns runs the three reports, retrieving the data via RMI calls. The client updates the intermediate database and also via Moodle's web services, creates new users and courses within Moodle and deletes users from Moodle who are no longer current within SIMS. The intermediate database is then ready for "Database enrolment". The original idea was to enrol users into the SIMS courses in Moodle via web services but this would need the contextid's of the courses within Moodle, but this is not currently achievable unless you read the Moodle database directly. When users and classes are created in Moodle I get their Moodle id's and store them in the intermediate database. This means when using database synchronisation I'm not relying on "idnumber" or "email", students and staff can have access to change their profiles, I can change them back whenever I want to via web services! POWER! Teachers will create their own courses and use meta links to the SIMS courses to populate their own course with staff and students. By synchronising the SIMS courses the teacher created courses are also synchronised with SIMS. The client code is still being tested at present but I will release the code when it's finished. The libraries and source code for CommandReporter Java API and MoodleRest are available for download from SourceForge, the CommandReporter one has the RMI server included. Authentication is done via MS LDAP. Another little project I've done recently using the CommandReporter library and RMI server is a SLG equivalent, obviously no write back, for parents to view their children's SIMS data. This uses Glassfish, Java server pages and servlets. Priority 1 contacts with an email address could see the data by logging on using their email address for authentication to which a URL with token is sent. The URL with token would allow the parent to see the data, all taken live from SIMS using reports. It works, tested, although not released to parents. This is just proof of concept at present. Phew, quite a long post! Bill

Hooray!!! Finally got SIMS and Moodle user and class integration, with no modification of the SIMS SQL database ie no added views. Three SIMS reports run remotely through my CommandReporter Java library to populate an intermediate database, another library, MoodleRest I created to talk to Moodle 2.0 via the REST web services which creates and deletes users also creates classes. The final piece of the jigsaw is Database enrollment. All run via cron at night. Together with meta course enrollment the courses created for teaching should be kept up to date.

You could connect to an NFS share so the remote share appears as a local directory within your Moodle if your Moodle is on a Linux server.

Thanks for that, it is an alternative, but I'm wondering why the repository function isn't doing its job. As far as I know there are plans to be able to connect to shares through the repository system in the future, embedding media will work but it does not solve the problem I have of future functionality. P.S. I get the same problem with my system at home. Apache 2.2.15-3.7 PHP 5.3.3-0.1.2 MySQL 5.1.46-2.18 All environment indicators are green within Moodle 2 OpenSuSE 11.3

Hi, I'm trying out the latest version of Moodle 2, downloaded and a fresh install. After enabling the "You Tube" repo, trying to add a file to a new course through the file picker, the list of repositories only gives me "Server files", "Recent files", "Upload a file" and "Private files". I did try to do this in an older version of Moodle 2 and got the same so I thought, start afresh but no luck. In my Advanced Features->Server->HTTP I have edited the proxy settings, I don't know if this has any effect as I have tried before and after changing this setting. The settings I've used here corresponds to our unfiltered proxy. This is a test site so can be erased and started again. Any clues how to fix? I can see that this will be used by our staff so want to get it up and running and check what holes I need in the filter and who has access to what.

Just checked, the Java RMI system is non-blocking and does dispatch a new thread for each new RMI call. So as long as the service which processes the call is thread safe, multiple calls all should process correctly. So it's now just down to Windows and the commandreporter.exe. Each call will be serviced by a new cmd environment. I'm again assuming, dangerous, but again I'm hoping those who have coded these parts have done so in a thread safe manner, that there will be no cross talk and be non-blocking.

True it may not, has not been tested under pressure. It all depends on how the Java RMI Library code for the server processes requests such as blocking/non-blocking. Currently I'm assuming, not always good, that it is non-blocking and therefore a new thread is begun to service each new request. The other limitation is the commandreporter.exe tool provided by Capita, it can be quite slow depending upon the detail of the report being run. That said, I'm not convinced that all parents will all want to see if their offspring have safely arrived at school all at the same time. So the requests will be spread out over time which should allow access in a reasonable amount of time.

Going my own route, SIF seems expensive when I can write routines to use the REST protocol to transfer data to Moodle 2. I'm currently waiting for updated routines within Moodle 2 to continue writing my Java REST communication class. Whilst waiting, I am writing, for my own brain massaging, an alternative to the parents view of Learning Gateway utilising a JSP running within Glassfish which fetches data via the CommandReporter Java API. Authentication is working and currently just basic information can be viewed. Changing the SIMS report by adding and removing fields, exposes more or less of the data to be viewed by the parent. I'm going to modularise the code so each additional class can show a different view of selected data. One good thing, no provisioning required and when students leave no tidying up to do with parental accounts. This is just for info if anyone is interested.

Updated the RMI server to return more descriptive error messages back to the client.

Hi, As I understand it from http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/39063-sims-zis-agent-6.html you say there is going to be a cost for SIF Agents, at the moment I'm looking for an opensource no cost method of transferring data from SIMS even if it is only one way, restrictive but better than nothing at all.

Hi cgilmour, I've uploaded an example to sourceforge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/simscommandrepo/files/) with instructions which views the data from assessment manager. There is an associated .repdef file which has to be imported into sims. I have ran a few tests and have managed to duplicate what you found. If you ran the report from the command line, but in running, an error was produced, then the error you received was produced when that same command line was run in the client software. This happend in my tests when the report name was incorrect or the report required parameters to be chosen. As far as I can see this is a result of the commandreporter.exe producing an error which is not being passed back to the client in a clean manner. I will at some point update the server side code and library to cope with this situation and report back appropriately. You could create a new java application and use the code below to test. Replace the appropriate places to suit your server and SIMS login. I have left out the "package" line, just copy and paste the rest after your generated "package" statement. I have chosen a CES report so you should have it in your system. The commandreporter string doesn't have to have the "commandreporter" within it, it will automatically appended anyway, the same goes for the "/quiet". Parameters "/user:xxxx" and "/password:xxxxxxx" can be in the commandreporter string but they can be left out and set instead using the setUsername and setPassword methods before the execute method. Note: If the report name contains spaces then the report name has to be enclosed in quotes, programatically this means adding escapes within the string \" before and after the report name. Running this report should produce a list of students with some of their details. P.S. don't forget to include the library. Also I have noticed the Level.SEVERE gets mangled on the edugeek site, the space needs to be removed. import java.rmi.RemoteException; import java.util.*; import java.util.logging.*; import net.beaconhillcott.CommandReporter; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { CommandReporter cr=new CommandReporter("myserver"); try { cr.execute("commandreporter /user:myuid /password:mypass /report:\"School List: Alphabetical Order\" /quiet"); Iterator i=cr.getFieldNames().iterator(); while (i.hasNext()) { System.out.print(i.next()+" "); } System.out.println(); i=cr.getDataRecords().iterator(); while (i.hasNext()) { ArrayList list=(ArrayList) i.next(); Iterator j=list.iterator(); while (j.hasNext()) { System.out.print(j.next()+" "); } System.out.println(); } } catch (RemoteException ex) { Logger.getLogger(Main.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } }

I will be very interested if I am able to attend.

I can only see SIMS->Moodle transfer not the other way around. One quote on http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=123795 says "Capita are not going to follow the SIF at all", this was about a year ago though and may be just hearsay.

Thanks

Could you point me to SIF.

Hi cgilmour Are you running the server side part of the RMI software and modified the environment paths as in the instructions?

Changed tack, working on SIMS->Moodle 2 using the REST protocol embedded in Moodle 2. Thought why develop for Moodle 1.9.x

Hi, Just an update: In the early stages but have created Java software which reads the SIMS database via the commandreporter tool which transfers data to Moodle. It currently creates courses with the same name as those in SIMS, creates user accounts and adds roles to the users of "student" and "teacher" within those courses. I used: Moodle XMLRPC module | The Linux Box as the basis for the Moodle server end of the xmlrpc calls but have had to edit the code fairly extensively to get it working due to deprecated calls. Still have to add the code to un-enrol users from the courses created from SIMS which are no longer in that class. Overall, the idea is to use these as child courses which can be added to the main courses for enrolment. It may also be possible later, once child courses have been added to the main courses to automatically add populated groups of the same name within the main courses. I hope this makes sense! My only addition to the SIMS database is to create UDF's for both students and staff to contain their username for the network. Gradual progress, but does exercise the brain cells.

Just tested the "Ping" method to Moodle using: https://secure.linuxbox.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=moodle_xmlrpc together with Java xml-rpc library from: ws-xmlrpc - Apache XML-RPC So, connecting to commandreporter.exe and using the above I should be able to create Classes and Users in Moodle directly from SIMS. Also, the software I've written could be cut down to be able to execute any .bat or .exe file remotely, in fact that's where it started, so new accounts can be created within the MS Windows domain. I think there is some work to do here.

Just a thought, obviously CommandReporter.exe only gets data from SIMS, wouldn't it be nice if Capita would write command line tools which would write data to SIMS, at least to "Assessment" and "UDF" anyway, areas which were already set up such as as aspects, resultsets and udf. Should not be too difficult and it would alleviate some dissatisfaction for those wanting to integrate their systems. Also, haven't tried to use my software to download images so that aspect is untested, hmmmmm........ Let me know if it works or otherwise.

Hi, Just joined edugeek, hello all. If you have any questions about the software please do not hesitate to contact me. I know the software has been downloaded but as yet I have had no feedback of any successes or otherwise, all I know it works for me.