18 February 2019, 21:15

Good day,

I'm currently busy doing some R&D around the LTI integration between Mahara and Sakai and keep getting the following issue:

• Access to (Website) was denied. You don't have authorisation to view this page. HTTP ERROR 403

We've setup and done the following:

• Working Mahara instance
• Created an Institute
• Created and linked the tool key and secret to Sakai
• Added the "webservice/rest/server.php?wsfunction=module_lti_launch" extension to our tool link

Some software information:

• Mahara version: 18.04.0
• Sakai version: Sakai 12.1
• Tool and Key creation date: 02/2019
• External App Service: LTI Integration
• External App Functions: module_lti_launch

If there is anything else that you need or think might be the issue please let me know :)

22 February 2019, 19:10

Hello Francois,

Thank you for your report and trying to connect Mahara to Sakai. I'm afraid I don't know where the problem could be as I don't have access to a Sakai instance. I suspect that Sakai may require a different URL. As you can see in the user manual, different LMS ask for different URLs or parameters. You might want to give those a try and see if that helps.

Once you have a working setup, I'd be happy to include instructions for Sakai in the user manual to make it easier for others to set things up.

Cheers

Kristina

22 February 2019, 20:05

Good day Kristina,

Thanks for the reply. I've just gone through the rest of the user manual, but it doesn't seem like the other url extensions work either... I did notice that each system has it's own unique url extension, so I wonder if Sakai perhaps doesn't have its own. Do you perhaps know where I might find this? I'll start with the mahara package so long.

24 February 2019, 9:19

Hi Francois,

I'd start with the Sakai documentation. There wasn't anything though that jumped out that said what would be required of the URL. You could check with the Sakai support team.

Cheers

Kristina

13 April 2019, 3:00

Hi François,

Sakai (like other LMS such as Canvas and BlackBoard) is sending custom properties through LTI. Mahara don't like those properties...

You need to modify the file module_lti_launch.php.

Add the following lines :

'ext_sakai_launch_presentation_css_url_list' => new external_value(PARAM_TEXT, 'Sakai ext_launch_presentation_css_url', VALUE_OPTIONAL),

'ext_sakai_role' => new external_value(PARAM_TEXT, 'Sakai role', VALUE_OPTIONAL),
'ext_sakai_server' => new external_value(PARAM_URL, 'Sakai server', VALUE_OPTIONAL),
'ext_sakai_serverid' => new external_value(PARAM_TEXT, 'Sakai server id', VALUE_OPTIONAL),

Regards,

15 April 2019, 12:43

Hi Philippe and Francois,

Thank you for the info on the Sakai parameters to whitelist.

Mahara ignores custom parameters if they are pre-fixed with "custom", but LMSs do send some other parameters through that aren't needed by Mahara. Since they have a special prefix and not "custom", they can't be ignored automatically and need to be whitelisted specifically in the Mahara instance.

There is a whishlist item open for a configurable option instead of needing to hard-code the parameters if you want to contribute to the development of it.

Cheers

Kristina

23 April 2019, 14:38

Hi Philippe and Francois,

With the next minor point update for all supported versions of Mahara (17.10+), a whitelisting of parameters will not be needed anymore. We've reviewed the issue and decided to ignore all parameters that are being passed through.

If you'd like to update your instance, you can find the details at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1825894 and the associated patch for your version of Mahara. We are expecting the minor point update in the next few days, latest by 30 April 2019 as it will coincide with the availability of Mahara 19.04.0.

Cheers

Kristina