OLAT PORTLET
SERVICES
V1.0 User Guide
Authors: Antonio Barresi, Je Lan Ong, Weiqiang Liu
OLAT Portlet Services
CONTENTS
CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................... 1
REVISION HISTORY ............................................................................................................. 2
WELCOME TO OLAT PORTLET SERVICES ............................................................................. 3
1 GETTING STARTED ....................................................................................................... 3
1.1 Requirements .................................................................................................................................. 3
2 THE SERVICES ............................................................................................................... 3
3 THE EXAMPLE CLIENTS ................................................................................................. 4
4 ONLINE HELP ................................................................................................................ 6
5 SUPPORTING INFORMATION ...................................................................................... 6
5.1 References ...................................................................................................................................... 6
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OLAT Portlet Services
REVISION HISTORY
Date Version Description Author(s)
15-05-2008 0.1 Setup Je Lan Ong
19-05-2008 0.2 Added section 3 Antonio Barresi
20-05-2008 0.3 Added section 2 Weiqiang Liu
28-05-2008 1.0 Final Version A. Barresi, J. Ong, W. Liu
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OLAT Portlet Services
WELCOME TO OLAT PORTLET SERVICES
OLAT Portlet Services provides you with RESTful web services [1] to popular functionalities of the OLAT
LMS [2]. It will give you the possibility for any portlets, specifically standard JSR-portlets [3] to interact
with the OLAT LMS and thus providing its functionalities.
1 GETTING STARTED
1.1 Requirements
To use the OLAT portlets you need access to a jsr-168 compliant portal and a OLAT LMS system with a
valid OLAT user account. The portal administrator has to install the portlet into his portal which is done by
deploying the portlet .war-archive with the portal specific installation procedure. This depends on the
used portal software. The only configuration parameter that has to be specified is the “olathost”
parameter which must match the hostname or IP of the OLAT LMS Server. The configuration parameter is
found in the portlet .war-archive under WEB-INF\portlet.xml. The portal administrator has to change this
configuration value before deploying the portlet.
After a successful installation the user will be able to add the OLAT portlets to his portal page and
immediately can start using them.
2 THE SERVICES
Using OLAT Portlet Services is quite easy, provided one has already a valid and activated OLAT
account.
A call to the service is done using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The URI is of the form:
http(s)://[path to your OLAT installation]/olat/webservice/[resource name]?[handles]
Example: http://localhost:8080/olat/webservice/courses?session&html
The resource names are:
courses: lists all the courses taken by an user
notes: lists all the notes of an user
bookmarks: lists all the bookmarks of an user
login: authenticates an user
logout: logs an user out of the system
help: shows this guide
The possible handles (passed as http GET variables) are:
u=[username]: sets the name of the OLAT user
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OLAT Portlet Services
p=[password]: sets the password of the OLAT user
session: if true enable session handling, so that after a login one do not need to provide user
credentials anymore
html: if true enable direct html output from the web service
By default, the session and html handles are not set. That means:
Result will be serialized by default as a JSON array.
One need to provide user credentials with the „u‟ and „p‟ handles upon each call to the web
service. But login and session handling will be provided when user follow a link to enter OLAT
(lazy login).
When the session handle is present, u and p will be ignored.
When the web service call returns, the result will be either a html page (with the html handle set), a
JSON array, or an error message.
The JSON object for the course resource will have then name and the url of the course, for direct
login and access to the course page.
The JSON object for the note resource will have the title and the text of the note.
The JSON object for the bookmark resource will have the title, the description and detail,
for detail data of the bookmark.
3 THE EXAMPLE CLIENTS
The three jsr-168 portlets: OLAT courselist portlet, OLAT notes portlet and OLAT bookmarks portlet
basically work in the same way.
If a user is not logged into the portal or there is no OLAT-portal-user-mapping defined (has to be done
by the portal administrator) a user has to login with its OLAT credentials into the portlet the first time he
wants to use the portlet.
After specifying the OLAT credentials the portlet will display the specific list of links (picture 1 “OLAT
Courselist Portlet”) that brings the user directly to the OLAT system without another login (see picture 2
“OLAT Demokurs Page”).
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Picture 1: OLAT Courselist Portlet
Picture 2: OLAT Demokurs Page
To deploy the portlets one simply has to add the .war archives to the portal and thanks to the jsr-168
standard the portlets will work without any further development. For a more integrated portlet
experience the portlets have to be extended with a mapping mechanism to have direct mapping
between the portal users and OLAT users, but this exceeds the scope of the project.
Picture 3 and 4 show further portlet examples.
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Picture 4: OLAT Bookmarks Portlet
Picture 3: OLAT Notes Portlet
4 ONLINE HELP
This guide is also accessible under:
http://[path to your olat installation]/olat/webservice/help
5 SUPPORTING INFORMATION
5.1 References
[1] REST: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
[2] OLAT: http://www.olat.org
[3] JSR168: http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168
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