SCORM Cloud V1 API Overview

Web API

It’s worth understanding that SCORM Cloud’s v1 API is based around simple HTTP GETs or POSTs, although it’s not RESTful. API calls end up looking like:

https://cloud.scorm.com/api?method=rustici.registration.exists&regid=123&appid=app123&ts=20171026221952&sig=.....

When working with our API v1 client libraries manually, building URLs by hand is not necessary; however, there are circumstances where it’s useful to understand that an API call is a GET or POST request to a particular URL.

Example Code

Here’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Each of the client libraries has its own README that explains how to configure the library and gives some sample API calls using that library. Below, we’ll look at some sample code using the Java client library.

Note

We have demo applications for Java and .NET, which can be useful to reference, but it’s generally easier to try some simple code in your own development environment. Our PHP library also has a samples directory in it.

Each of our client libraries uses a Configuration object to store the API credentials and configuration. Here’s how the Java one works:

Configuration cfg = new Configuration(
             "https://cloud.scorm.com/EngineWebServices",
             "your app ID",
             "your secret key",
             "test.app.1.0");

This Configuration has four parameters:

• Service URL -- this is a relic of previous product iteration and should usually be set to the value above (unless you cannot support HTTPS for some reason).
• App ID -- the application ID you noted above
• Secret Key -- one of the secret keys you noted above
• Origin String -- used for debugging on the SCORM Cloud developers’ side; it’s useful for this value to be your application or company name, but it doesn’t have to be.

With this, you can configure the ScormCloud convenience singleton:

ScormCloud.setConfiguration(cfg);

The ScormCloud class is a convenience class to provide access to a variety of pre-built methods. For example, to check if a course exists,

boolean exists = ScormCloud.getCourseService().Exists("some course id");

where some course id would, of course, be some course ID. We recommend looking at the README for a specific client library for more information, or contact us at support.

Clients are Wrappers

The API client libraries are relatively thin wrappers around the real web API. The above .getCourseService().Exists corresponds to the “real” course service’s exists method. That is: the web documentation is authoritative, and so when we link to API methods in the documentation, we’re linking to the authoritative web API documentation. Client libraries (usually) have matching methods already implemented.

The ScormCloud class just offers convenient access to already implemented API calls. However, using the ServiceRequest class, we can directly make any API call in SCORM Cloud, even one that’s not already implemented in the library itself. For example,

ServiceRequest request = new ServiceRequest(cfg);
request.getParameters().add("courseid", "some course id");

Document response = request.callService("rustici.course.exists");

Element resultElem = (Element) (response.getElementsByTagName("result").item(0));
return Boolean.parseBoolean(resultElem.getTextContent());

This block of code calls the rustici.course.exists method, the same as the above, directly. This is actually the implementation of the CourseService#Exists method in the Java client library.

The above Java examples are written in Java, but all of our client libraries implement effectively the same set of classes.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve got an API client up and going, take a look at LMS Integration or the API Reference. Have further questions? Contact our support.