LON-CAPA LON-CAPA Help

LON-CAPA Help

The Domain Coordination Manual includes both a description of tasks which require standard LON-CAPA interaction via a web browser, with the Domain Coordinator role active, but also tasks which require command line access to the primary library server in a domain. In some cases one individual may complete both these types of task, whereas in others a separate Systems Administrator may need to be called upon for tasks completed from the command line.

With the Domain Coordinator role active, the Main Menu provides a Domain Coordinator with access to the functionality needed to complete the routine tasks which a Domain Coordinator carries out, including creation of courses, approval of course requests, and assignment of author roles. Courses can be created interactively by completing a web form or can be created in batch mode by uploading a file containing course specifications for one or more courses. The right to submit course requests via a web form may also be granted to groups of users, and requests can be set to be processed automatically, or require Domain Coordinator approval. Addition of users/roles can similarly be carried out interactively, or by uploading a text file of users. The Domain Coordinator may also periodically need to modify domain settings via the Domain Configuration menu.

LON-CAPA provides hooks to permit integration with institutional information systems to support the following procedures:

Authentication via an institutional authentication service (e.g., LDAP)
Automatic updates of classlists
Automatic updates of user information
Automatic processing of validated course requests for "official" courses.
Retrieval of institutional user information for individual users
Searches for users at the institution
Automatic import of student photos from an institutional repository

There are three perl modules included in LON-CAPA (localauth.pm localenroll.pm, and localstudentphoto.pm all located in /home/httpd/lib/perl) which need to be customized to provide integration with institutional systems.

Although customization and testing will involve a systems administrator, and programmer(s) at an institution, a Domain Coordinator is likely to be involved in the design and testing phases of the integration, if not in the actual implementation. Set-up of a standalone LON-CAPA instance on a separate server is advised for the purposes of implementing and testing institutional integration, before enabling the new functionality on the production system.

Besides the integration described above, customization of localenroll.pm is also needed (at present) to define the titles used for official course categories (e.g., Year, Semester, Department, Number) which can be used as filters when searching the Course/Community Catalog.

LON-CAPA installation and/or update will provide unmodifed copies of the three customizable files in /home/httpd/lib/perl, each with -std appended, i.e., localauth-std.pm, localenroll-std.pm, and localstudentphoto-std.pm. These files receive updates when ./UPDATE is run to update a LON-CAPA installation to a newer version, while their customized equivalents will be left untouched.

If you have previously customized localenroll.pm it is recommended that you compare the contents of localenroll.pm and localenroll-std.pm after an update to see if there are new subroutines (which exist as stubs in localenroll-std.pm) which can be copied to your custom localenroll.pm and later customized, should you wish to use that functionality.