Configurable LTI Consumer XBlock

This XBlock is built on top of edX LTI consumer Xblock to ease its configuration by Instructors.

Here are a few examples of what this module brings to Open edX:

• Pre-configure LTI services that can be added in one-click from the Advanced component button,
• Enforced configuration for some LTI Services by targetting a launch url pattern,
• Enforced default configuration for all LTI Services for better control, security or ergonomy,
• Platform-level LTI credentials configuration available to all courses. courses.

Installation

This package can be installed with pip:

$ pip install configurable_lti_consumer-xblock

Edx's lti_consumer-xblock is required as an extra dependency if you are willing to install or test this XBlock as a standalone package. You can install it separately with pip:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/edx/xblock-lti-consumer@v1.1.8#egg=lti-consumer-xblock

If you plan to install it in a base Open edX installation, this dependency will already be available, and thus you don't need to execute the above command.

Getting started

First things first, if you plan to work on the project itself, you will need to clone this repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:openfun/xblock-configurable-lti-consumer.git

Once the project has been cloned on your machine, you will need to build a custom edx-platform docker image that includes the configurable LTI consumer XBlock and setup a development environment that includes all required services up and running (more on this later):

$ cd xblock-configurable-lti-consumer
$ make bootstrap

If everything went well, you should now be able to access the following services:

• Open edX LMS: http://localhost:8072
• Open edX CMS: http://localhost:8082

with the following credentials:

email: admin@example.com
password: admin

Configuration examples

A typical LTI configuration looks like this:

LTI_XBLOCK_CONFIGURATIONS = [
    {
        "display_name": "Marsha Video",
        "oauth_consumer_key": "InsecureOauthConsumerKey",
        "shared_secret": "InsecureSharedSecret",
        "is_launch_url_regex": True,
        "automatic_resizing": True,
        "inline_ratio": 0.5625,
        "hidden_fields": [
            "lti_id",
            "description",
            "launch_target",
            "custom_parameters",
            "button_text",
            "modal_height",
            "modal_width",
            "has_score",
            "weight",
            "hide_launch",
            "accept_grades_past_due",
            "ask_to_send_username",
            "ask_to_send_email",
        ],
        "defaults": {
            "custom_parameters": [],
            "ask_to_send_username": True,
            "weight": 0,
            "modal_height": 400,
            "ask_to_send_email": True,
            "accept_grades_past_due": False,
            "button_text": "button",
            "has_score": False,
            "hide_launch": False,
            "launch_target": "iframe",
            "modal_width": 80,
            "launch_url": "https://marsha\.education/lti/videos/[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[0-9a-f]{12}",
            "lti_id": "marsha",
        },
    },
    {
        "pattern": ".*ltiapps\.net.*",
        "hidden_fields": ["launch_target"],
        "defaults": {"launch_target": "modal"},
    },
    {
        "display_name": "LTI consumer",
        "pattern": ".*",
        "hidden_fields": ["ask_to_send_username", "ask_to_send_email"],
        "automatic_resizing": False,
        "defaults": {
            "ask_to_send_email": True,
            "launch_target": "new_window",
            "ask_to_send_username": True,
        },
    },
]

This configuration does several things:

• it adds a "Marsha Video" link behind the Advanced component button in the Studio to add a video in one click. The video is automatically added to the Marsha instance pointed by the launch url,
• it forces all LTI consumer XBlocks that are pointing to ltiapps.net to use a modal,
• it proposes all other LTI consumer XBlocks to open in a new window as a default and forces to ask before sending the user's username and email.

The order of each configuration in this list is important because we will use, for a given XBlock, the first configuration pattern that matches its launch url.

If you wish to encrypt the oauth_consumer_key and shared_secret credentials and keep the other settings visible, you can declare one of them or both in a separate setting LTI_XBLOCK_SECRETS, using the lti_id as mapping key:

LTI_XBLOCK_SECRETS = {
    "marsha": {
        "oauth_consumer_key": "InsecureOauthConsumerKey",
        "shared_secret": "InsecureSharedSecret",
    }
}

Note that the workbench included in the present repository is running this configuration (see config/settings.yml.dist) on the official France Université Numérique Open edX extended Docker image.

Integration to Open edX Studio

For now, this project requires a small fork of edx/edx-platform if you want to add, for some of your configurations, preconfigured options in the Advanced component button of the Studio.

In our opinion, this small fork is worth applying because:

• it will save you from installing many XBlocks and helps keep your Open edX installation manageable,
• it allows you to automatically add a specific link for each LTI service you want to offer to your instructors. They don't need to activate LTI and provide the credentials for each course... they don't need to provide the launch url of the service for each XBlock they add...

For open-release/hawthorn.1, the patch to apply is available here: https://gist.github.com/sampaccoud/f15083325cec4f14a53bfb78fb4b4e42

Developer guide

Once the project has been bootstrapped (see "Getting started" section), to start working on the project, use:

$ make dev

You can stop running services via:

$ make stop

If for any reason, you need to drop databases and start with fresh ones, use the down target:

$ make down

License

This work is released under the AGPL 3.0 License (see LICENSE).