MNV Gateway

Tool Consumer(LMS) Integration

For the Gateway to be fully functional LMS's of different institutions must also have some minimum setup done via Out of Band Registration.

This implementation will likely be completed by the Gateway Team or other MNV entity along with the institution's LMS admin. Information is provided here for completeness as well as to understand how the links are created when providing information to instructors.

There are 3 primary pieces of information that must be included when integrating the Gateway with a new LMS:

  1. Username/Shared Secret - it is recommended to set these values globally for the LMS as this information uniquely identifies the LMS to the Gateway.
  2. Domain - this is the domain of the Gateway (gateway.mnv-tech.com).
  3. Links - Links are likely the most interesting part of the integration and are what the user will eventually click on to perform a launch.

Link Creation

Links are broken into multiple pieces. Some owned by the Gateway and some owned by the Tool Provider. Below is an example of a simple link which is attempting to launch a Sapling tool with the context of a specific assignment and question.

https://gateway.mnv-tech.com/v1/launch/LTI11/Sapling/Launch?assignment=123&question=5

        [Domain]             [Version]  [Type]    [Adapter]   [Tool Provider]  [Service]   [Query String]
https://gateway.mnv-tech.com /v1        /launch   /LTI11      /Sapling         /Launch     ?assignment=123&question=5
[Gateway Owned ------------------------------------------------------------------------]   [Tool Provider Owned-----]

The Gateway uses the [Tool Provider] to determine where to route the user to. The [Service] is used to determine what the user is attempting to do. For Single Sign On this is always "Launch". The [Query String] is owned by the Tool Provider and can be set to any value necessary for the Tool Provider to gain context about the requested launch.

Enabling LTI1.1 Grade Return

The Gateway has the ability to expose the LTI1.1 outcome service to the Tool Provider, however this must be enabled by the Tool Consumer. Generally the option exists to set the LTI link to "Enable Evaluation" from within the LMS. When enabled the LTI request to the Gateway will contain additional parameters that allow the Gateway return an LTI Outcome Result back to the Tool Consumer.

Creating Database Entries

INSERT INTO tool_consumer (name, description, auth_type, oauth_consumer_key, shared_secret, lms_type, lms_version, contact_name, contact_phone, contact_email, date_time_updated, url, credentials_json)
VALUES ('UniqueTC', 'Description of UniqueTC tool consumer', 'OAuth1', 'UniqueTCUser', '4d5e6f', 'blackboard-building-block', '1.6', NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL);