Moodle in English: Using an external tool from a plugin

Using an external tool from a plugin

by Colin Davidson - Thursday, January 21, 2016, 9:16 AM

Hello,

I'm working on developing a moodle plugin (no previous experience with Moodle plugins) to allow users to choose media from our external site and embed them in the page (using atto or tinymce). We a have an external tool setup https://docs.moodle.org/30/en/External_tool_settings which works well.

All the parts about working the the appropriate editor and embedding the resulting content is clear enough.

What I can't figure out is how to access our configured LTI tool from our plugin in order to open a popup window to select the media. Is there a way to do this? Do I instead have to write another plugin to do the lti integration instead of relying on the External Tool functionality?

When doing the same thing for canvas, we just needed to add some xml configuration when setting up the external tool:

      <lticm:options name="editor_button">
        <lticm:property name="enabled">true</lticm:property>
        <lticm:property name="url">Link to our external site</lticm:property>
        <lticm:property name="text">Media Chooser</lticm:property>
        <lticm:property name="selection_width">800</lticm:property>
        <lticm:property name="selection_height">600</lticm:property>
      </lticm:options>

Unless I'm missing something, I don't think that particular option is available with Moodle, but I'm hoping there's some way to use our existing External Tool.

Any help is appreciated. And apologies if this isn't the right forum for this. If that's the case, I would appreciate knowing what is

Re: Using an external tool from a plugin

by Alistair Spark - Thursday, January 21, 2016, 11:30 PM

Hi Colin,

I don't believe this is directly available in Moodle, all of the systems I know of who have done similar integrations have had to develop this as part of their own plugin set - e.g.:

https://github.com/mediacore/mediacore-moodle

Was done as part of a local plugin.

Thanks

Alistair

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Re: Using an external tool from a plugin

by Colin Davidson - Friday, January 22, 2016, 2:14 AM

Thanks Alistair. I appreciate knowing I'm not missing something obvious before working on a plugin for this. Have a great day.

Colin

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Re: Using an external tool from a plugin

by R K - Thursday, January 28, 2016, 6:35 PM

Hi Colin ,

We are in the same situation as yours .
Are you following some guide on developing plugins for Moodle . Any help would be appreciated .

For Moodle , if we know which resource to get from the server - its easier to add a custom tag when doing the "Add Activity or Resource " , where the resource_id would be the "id" of the resource .

However the search pop up and embedding is something that we are looking for as well .

Developing an App for Canvas and integrating with the Content was pretty simple [ With a search bar on the pop up ] .

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Re: Using an external tool from a plugin

by Colin Davidson - Friday, January 29, 2016, 4:09 AM

Hey RK,

Not really. I didn't find a comprehensive one. I got most of what I needed from looking at other plugins. I did look at https://github.com/Pepitu/Moodle-specific-TinyMCE-example-plugin, but I suspect you're well past that basic level point. I basically used it to get a feel for how other plugins work.

I've been able to successfully build my plugin using a tinymce plugin and a local plugin. The local plugin does the work of retrieving the LTI information and signing the request URLs and the tinymce plugin uses the signed urls to retrieve the data and display it to a user.

The mediacore plugin linked above does that (and more), with the crucial logic being in the client class. It also shows you how to setup settings for a local plugin, if you didn't know.

Colin

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LTI and Moodle

Using an external tool from a plugin