Got our proposed transport/rpc method SCA working finally !!

Turns out that SCA is only supported on php versions 5.20 or greater, which accounts for the SOAP errors we were getting on our test server.

It also turns out that SOAP has a caching service, and seeing as SCA uses php's built in SOAP functions, php was caching all the SCA generated WSDL documents . This lead to great confusion whilst testing, as new SCA functions exposed in the remote SCA component were not being recognised in the local SCA component.

Once the directives in php.ini were altered to:
soap.wsdl_cache = 0
soap.wsdl_cache_enabled = 0

Everything was fine and dandy.

Next job is to test that SDO (service data objects) can be sent using SCA, then we can actually get down to implementing the products of the last four meetings :)

Here are brief decision notes from our Technical Team meeting on 20th March
2007

1. Arran to take forward getting the Service Component Architecture
installed on our servers

2. In terms of how things would look on Moodle, we felt that the point at
which the student clicked the "Submit All and Finish" button would be the
point at which marks were transferred over from Moodle to the
Administration database

3. We generated a list of rules around managing submission:

a) Student can make multiple attempts up to deadline (if the assessment
permits it)

b) Implication of (a) is that we need to prevent staff from editing the
record on the SRS side of things (Sussex Direct) until the deadline has
elapsed

c) If complicated mark rules have been set up in Moodle, then it's Moodle's
job to follow those rules and present the appropriate mark for transferring

4. A number of issues emerged that we would need to think through further,
e.g. discuss with the Academic Office:

a) submissions might not be transferred if students didn't press the
"Submit All and Finish" button

b) how would we be able to allow late submissions in exceptional
circumstances?

c) are there any current encodings of marks where mark is not an integer
(e.g. using an "A", "B" scale)

d) Some Quizzes might have a combination of automatically marked and
tutor-marked questions. We need to manage this too.

5. We agreed that for the peer review on 25th April, we would like to
demonstrate a working version of Assessment set up. We would probably aim
to use Service Component Architecture to do this.

Next meeting 30th March to discuss Service Component
Architecture

We've posted up DTDs for the draft Assessment and Marks data Information Model along with a couple of example XML files, onto the XMarks Project Activities page.

Action points from today's meeting:

1. Arran to take a more detailed look at Service Component Architecture
library:

http://www.osoa.org/display/PHP/SCA+with+PHP

2. Arran and John to look into the RCP/Document style web services issue,
starting off with this discussion posted by Warwick - linked to from here:

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/xmarks/2007/02/rpc-style-and-document-style-web.html

3. Arran to scan in his UML sequence diagrams and him and Carol to put them
onto the Project web site

4. Arran and John to look at the XML listing coming out of Sussex Direct
for the "get_assessments" listing

5. Paolo and Carol to talk over the Moodle end of things

We agreed that next week's discussion would be more focused on Moodle.

We also agreed that we'd aim to implement the Use Case "Tutor creates an
assignment on the learning management system" for the Peer Review meeting
on 25th April.

These are the slides from the presentation to the Assessment SIG :

assessment_sig_22_feb_07.ppt

This is the information model as discussed by the SIG during the presentation:

XMarks draft info model v0-2.pdf
(As the information model changes, we will post information about it on the Project web site, in the "Activities and Deliverables" section)