[Using Sakai] External statistics reports

[Steve Swinsburg]

Hi Greg,

The URL:
/portal/tool/68f5-19bb-4269-8546-92a6e/?wicket:bookmarkablePage=:org.sakaiproject.sitestats.tool.wicket.pages.ReportsPage&siteId=5df2f-79e7-4514-b41d-388b

is a stable URL, though what you are requesting is that particular instance of the Site Stats tool, and you are sending some data. It may not be designed to be called in that manner.

The URL:
/portal/tool/68f5-19bb-4269-8546-92a6e /?wicket:interface=:4:reportsForm:myReportsContainer:myReports:2:reportRow:link::ILinkListener::

is not stable, and is requesting particular versions of pages from within Wicket's page cache. I would suggest that that particular page was certainly not designed to be accessed in this manner.

It should be pretty trivial to create an admin Sakai tool that allows arbitrary SQL to be entered, and saved for later running again, and the results available as an export. 

Hoping for functionality won't work, you'll need to file them as feature requests within Jira (jira.sakaiproject.org) so that they can be looked at. 

The best way to get this done though is if you have some resources (not necessarily your own, maybe a developer at your institution, or funding) then features like these can be implemented since Sakai is an open source community mainly led by volunteers, whereas Canvas is run by a commercial organisation.

cheers,
Steve

On 22/08/2012, at 10:37 AM, Gregory Guthrie <guthrie at mum.edu> wrote:

> Thanks for the clarifications and info.
> 
> I am using an mySQL browser to create queries, and have one now for Roster, and will make ones for the other report data.
> 
> I do understand the fragility of this approach, but think that while I can do this is a few days, understanding the internal infrastructure and APIs of Sakai, and setting up and learning the development environment would take significantly longer.
> 
> At the same time I'll keep hoping for Canvas like external services for statistics!  :-)
> 
> Although I do understand that the URLs were not intended for external use, I don't see why curl'ing to them would not work, seems like they should be source agnostic to any valid request (unless they are from local AJAX context on the page, which they did not look like to me).
> 
> Also, I did not understand how John's approach of asking for a service to run a SQL query was any different functionally than just running it myself from an external tool.
> 
> Thanks again for your patience with a new user!
> -------------------------------------------
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Steve Swinsburg [mailto:steve.swinsburg at gmail.com]
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2012 6:50 PM
>> To: Gregory Guthrie
>> Cc: John Bush; sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
>> Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] External statistics reports
>> 
>> Hi Greg,
>> 
>> The URLs you listed are internal tool page URLs, they are not designed for being requested
>> externally. Entity broker is a way to request data like the web services, and perhaps John's
>> script might be better suited there, but it news to be specifically coded.
>> 
>> If you want to run arbitrary SQL queries against the DB, you should understand the risks
>> before opening that up as a web service. My recommendation is that you use a tool to create
>> these reports. You could just use an SQL query browser to do this. An admin tool to run SQL
>> within Sakai would be neat though.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Steve
>>