Over the years, in the “External Tool” UI in the Admin Workspace, we have been evolving a set of check boxes that capture the message types a tool can accept and the placements in the Sakai UI that we want the tool to appear. Launch message types and placements are very different concepts and in the old UI there was a bit of mixing. And there was no “Left Nav” placement. With this Jira these will appear as follows:

The privacy message indicator was moved under message type and a new placement (site navigation) was added.

With this change, the administrator can truly place an LTI tool wherever they like. However there is still a problem. Historically, code in Lessons, Site Manage, or whatever often did not strictly require a placement to be checked and instead “guessed” which tools belonged in which placements based on message types and other bits and bobs in the data model.

The worst example of this was how Site Info → Manage Tools worked. Since prior to this Jira there was no ‘site-level’ navigation placement, to construct the list of external tools to show in Site info it would list a tool petty much if the tool could accept a resource link message. This meant instructors saw tools that were not appropriate for the left navigation use case in Site Manage and there was no easy way for administrators to control what appeared there. I am guessing that stealthing was used as a hack at times to hack / work around this limitation.

Immediately after this change, any placement of an LTI tool selector in Sakai will switch from ad hoc “guessing” what tools might support this placement and erring on the side of more tools rather than fewer tools, each placement will only show tools which are marked as showing up in that placement (i.e. err on only including tools explicitly indicated for a placement).

So after this is put into production, some External Tools will disappear from some places in the the Sakai UI. All the administrator has to do is go into the External Tool configuration and explicitly indicate where the tool is to be placed. It will require a bit of manual fixing for the admin to indicate placements explicitly but with this the admin can truly control what tools appear at what points in the Sakai UI.

In effect, the value of this Jira is that the Placement check boxes really work and tools only show up in a placement if the placement is checked. In short, with this update, Sakai will consistently support placements giving administrators a lot of flexibility and control. Of course, with flexibility and control, there comes some responsibility.

This all has evolved slowly, where we introduced a placement type without requiring it to be checked in the name of upwards compatibility. The placement and message types (other than site-nav) have been in the UI for years - so hopefully admins have been checking them to indicate where they want a tool to show up - and likely frankly confused at times when more than the checked tools show up with no way to stop them from showing up. This will rationalize all that going forward.

Another change, now that the external tools appearing in Site Manage is under precise admin control, we won’t hide them under an expando section - they will just appear as a tool in the tool list - in alphabetical order with all the other tools. (like other LMS’s that support course nav placements already do )