[Building Sakai] URL directly to edit tools part of site-manage

[Regan, Alan]

Dear Adrian and Dev List,

Adrian, thank you for posting your inquiry to the list.  I see that a few people responded, but I wanted to ask the dev list for advice on how to address an issue we've discovered.

Working with our great hosting partner, Longsight, we've been making progress on a development project together.  To help our professors, we are trying to add shortcut links so that professors can quickly modify their sites with fewer clicks. Unfortunately we've run into a snag related to how the Site Info tool works.  In order to deep link to Edit Tools, Page Order, or Manage Access, it seems like Sakai 2.6 and 2.7 requires the user to first initiate a Site Info session before you can deep link to a specific tool in site-manage.

You can learn more about our project goals here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1moJOkQ0AxFRLLJxINuL3_MUAETQKBoSJPRJyXFf5_xs/edit?hl=en&authkey=CI3N_5UH

(The screenshot in the GoogleDoc is a little outdated, but it still communicates the concept.)

Per Longsight, "We're using xsl-portal to insert (among other things) an unordered list below the list of tools that points to various Site Info tasks using the 'directtool' syntax. Here are the urls we've constructed to deep link the user to specific parts of Site Info:

Publish a site:
/xsl-portal/directtool/sakai.siteinfo?sakai.site=[YOUR_SITEID_HERE]&sakai_action=doMenu_edit_site_access

Edit Tools:
/xsl-portal/directtool/sakai.siteinfo?sakai.site=[YOUR_SITEID_HERE]&sakai_action=doMenu_edit_site_tools

Page Order:
/xsl-portal/directtool/sakai.siteinfo?sakai.site=[YOUR_SITEID_HERE]&sakai_action=doPageOrderHelper

"It works fairly well, although we've noticed that the first time the user clicks the links in a given session, they're taken to just the generic Site Info main page. After that, they're taken directly to the deep link. It's as though Sakai won't let them access the deeper page link until they go to the main Site Info page first to initialize the tool. They only have to do this once per session per site, and then the deep links will work. This happens in 2.6 and 2.7. I'd welcome any insight anyone has on if there's any way to eliminate this need."

***********

NOTE: Longsight developed a solution so that our "Publish Now" feature is working by directly updating the publish status of a site. It's the Edit Tools and Page Order situation that we need community assistance with.

If anyone on the dev list has an idea on how to address the Site Info session problem, we'd love to hear it!

Thanks in advance for your time.

Sincerely,

Alan Regan, MFA
Manager, Technology and Learning
Information Technology
Pepperdine University
(310) 506-6756

-----Original Message-----
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:12:53 +0100
From: Adrian Fish <a.fish at lancaster.ac.uk>
Subject: [Building Sakai] URL directly to edit tools part of
	site-manage
To: Sakai Dev <sakai-dev at collab.sakaiproject.org>
Message-ID: <4DA5CB85.5060204 at lancaster.ac.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Anybody know how to construct a URL directly to the 'Edit Tools' part of 
site-manage? Can it be done?

Cheers,
Adrian.

-- 
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Adrian Fish
Software Engineer
Centre for e-Science
Bowland Tower South C Floor
Lancaster University
Lancaster
LA1 4YW
email: a.fish at lancaster.ac.uk

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