Can holding tank fully replaced by Valence API? - desire2learn

Question

If the answer is Yes, please provide reference documents.
I'm new to valence api.
Best Regards,
Khiem

Answer 1

Yes! We officially turned off the holding tank this summer. It has been a real pain. I've re-implemented the functionality using valence and feel much better about our flexibility now. I wrote a PHP wrapper around the API calls and it works beautifully.
As far as reference docs, I simply used the valence documentation to design the wrapper.
I have written several PHP wrappers for REST services like Valence, I start off with 3 generic functions
basicGet($url)
basicPost($url,$data)
basicPut($url,$data)
The I can write functions that call the specific REST paths with the data each one needs.
I used the PHP libraries from D2L D2LAppContext.php & D2LAppContextFactory.php to create the Authorization and User contexts, and also to create the AuthenticatedUri's, From that point forwardI use my own functions and PHP's CURL functions to call Valence.
Here is an example of my basic GET function
function basic_get($opContext,$url){
$url = $opContext->createAuthenticatedUri($url,"GET");
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
return(json_decode($response));
}
I am currently working out an SSL problem, that is why the CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER is set to FALSE. You should not have to do that. From there, you can do something like this:
function get_user($opContext,$userid){
return basic_get($opContext,"/d2l/api/lp/1.1/users/$userid");
}
From there it is just a matter of wrapping each REST path in a function. The POST and PUT basic functions are a bit more complicated to get working, but once they are, implementing new paths is a breeze.