[Using Sakai] External statistics reports

[Gregory Guthrie]

I just want to check if I am understanding this correctly;
I want to generate some automated reports on student visits, forum usage & participation, faculty forum usage, and assignments submitted.

I already defined the reports that have adequate data for me, but don't want to have to manually click through a GUI for statistics/reports/Report-Visits/Export every week across all courses.

One option is to write database queries, and that will work, but is a bit messy to setup (I did some trials), and is not recommended because database structures and relations are not guaranteed between releases.

Another option is to write some user programmed extensions which will do the reports, and expose them as web-services, and then query externally using these. This requires some fairly detailed knowledge of the internals and how to write extensions, how to use the internal API to do reports, and to write and maintain the Java code.

Since I see that Sakai already has the reports defined internally in an XML format definition, and they are named; is there any existing API by which I could tell it to run the report (and export/return the results)? I looked at trying to use web-automation to submit the URLs equivalent to the manual GUI navigation, but they seem to be stateful, and I haven't yet figured out if that approach would work.

Canvas has a set of web-service APIs that expose their statistics in a simple way either programmatically or using various web tools (curl, wget, ...). This is the type of thing that I was hoping to find.

Any hints appreciated; or to at least to confirm that this is a correct understanding of the situation.
Thanks.(I'm not sure if this should be in this forum, or the developers forum.)
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