{"id":634,"date":"2018-06-05T16:57:08","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T04:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=634"},"modified":"2018-06-05T16:57:08","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T04:57:08","slug":"integration-with-the-alma-course-api-anzreg2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/integration-with-the-alma-course-api-anzreg2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Integration with the Alma Course API #anzreg2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The Alma Course API &#8211; An Exercise in Course Integration<\/strong><br \/>\nDavid Lewis<\/p>\n<p>Alma Course Loader was inflexible \u2013 only runnable once a day, and doesn\u2019t let you recover from errors. So wanted to write their own. Migrated to Alma when SOAP was available; later had to rewrite for REST API.\u00a0 With the advent of Leganto the integration has become of even more importance.<\/p>\n<p>Importance of API quotas and minimising frequency of calls. (Especially as the same API gateway is used by all Alma customers!) Course field mappings also important at the start. Another difficulty was course collapsing and parent-child course relationships (eg different cohorts within one course) which was important at their uni and was the hardest part to figure out. Ended up using course code for normal courses and parent course code for collapsed courses.<\/p>\n<p>Discovered that even when they asked for JSON, error messages would come back as XML and crash their system \u2013 so ended up just writing their program to use XML instead of JSON.<\/p>\n<p>Logging is a good debugging tool and audit trail and useful when raising jobs with Ex Libris.<\/p>\n<p>Senior management often doesn\u2019t value library contribution to course management \u2013 this is often political and requires a lot of awareness-raising among lecturers etc to get them to talk up the library to project managers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Alma Course API &#8211; An Exercise in Course Integration David Lewis Alma Course Loader was inflexible \u2013 only runnable once a day, and doesn\u2019t let you recover from errors. So wanted to write their own. Migrated to Alma when SOAP was available; later had to rewrite for REST API.\u00a0 With the advent of Leganto [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[291,290,303,296],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":635,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions\/635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}