LTI and Moodle

Hi Brian,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. I will say, upfront, that Blackboard was not a system this was tested with (having no access to that), so I can only speak to generally about the way this is intended to work, not to the Blackboard specifics..

Firstly, because of the way Moodle provides it's content via the enrolment method, it MUST have the custom property 'id' set for resource link launches. The general flow is:
1. Instructor launches into the content selection flow from the platform (linking account when prompted)
2. Instructor selects something they've published on the tool. E.g. an activity or course
3. This content item is returned to the platform (Blackboard, etc.) where it must create the appropriate resource link. This content item information includes the relevant 'id' needed to launch the respective published activity or course.
4. User clicks the resource link in the platform and can view the course/activity.

Users are also free to manually create links in the platform, provided they set the id=xxx custom claim value (as Gemma mentions, this is visible in the tool's "Published as LTI tools" table). This is of course the more clunky method means of achieving the same thing: a resource link in the platform.

So, in your case, don't try to launch the tool unless you're launching from a link created during deep linking (or a link which you've manually created and which includes the relevant id=xxxxx custom property). We need this id and there is no support for a non-deeplink launch without it.

With respect to the problem with the link creation in Blackboard, that's unfortunately something I don't know. I've only used this with Canvas, and of course Moodle platforms. I believe others have used it with D2L, but I'm not sure about Blackboard. You may need to troubleshoot that further on that end. All I can say is that the content item that we return is per the specification and has been checked using the 1EdTech certification suite, as most tools have (that's not to say there may be an issue, of course, as that suite doesn't check everything).

With regards to the provisioning modes, that's really a matter of choice and probably applies to teachers moreso than it does to students in your case. Students aren't expected to have existing accounts in your Moodle site (I don't think at least, correct me if I'm wrong), so they need to have their accounts automatically created. This is essentially the way this worked going back to LTI 1.1 and 2.0. This is why the value for Student is defaulted to "New accounts only (automatic)". I'd suggest just leaving this as it is.

Teachers, on the other hand, with LTI 1.3, are expected to use the deep linking feature, which exposes a whole list of published content they have access to. To determine that access, we need to use their existing account (and they will of course have one since they are using Moodle to create the content in the first place). This is what the "Existing accounts only (prompt)" method is about. It'll force a teacher, on first launch, to bind their existing account, after which we can establish which resources they have access to and report that during the content selection workflow described above. Again, you don't need to use this flow; you may also just create the resource link manually in the platform, provide the id=xx value and away you go just the same.

So, ultimately, you have 2 choices:
1. Figure out why deep linking is failing in Blackboard. Including a network trace from Chrome (a HAR file) of the deep linking (content selection) process might give me some insight, but it also might not if it's something on Blackboard's end. There are some issues that we still need to work through around partitioned cookies when this process takes place in an iframe, so depending on your platform/browser combination, that could perhaps be in play here too.
2. Create the resource link manually in Blackboard (I'm certain they will support this too). All you need to do is make sure the custom claim has the 'id' property set to the value defined in the tool site.

If you have the time/patience, it would be nice to work through 1, but I understand if you just want to get this up and running and don't want to muck around with that.