Benefits of the Author API based Activity editor

The new Author Site now supports the Author API-based Activity editor. This API based editor allows you to create and edit Items within Activities, allowing for faster corrections to Items in your banks.

You can also configure the editor to use multiple Item banks or Item pools to search for Items and add them to Activities. Items added from Item pools or read only Item banks cannot be edited.

You can configure custom player templates to be used in Activities if you don't want to use the default presets provided. The custom player templates configured through the Author API initialization options cannot be modified by authors. Content admins can however also create customized player templates using the template builder, which can then be reused by Authors across different Activities so that they have the same UI settings.

The list of Activities can be filtered out for specific authors using permission groups. You can also configure read-only access for Activities in your Item banks using the permission groups.

Titles can be enabled for Activities at the list and edit levels to give them a meaningful name so that authors can differentiate between Activities and manage Activities much more easily. 

Figure 1: Author API based Activity list in the Author site.

Check out the article explaining some of the configuration options possible with the Author API based Activity editor. 

Note:To use the API based editor, you need to be using an API version of v2020.2.LTS or above in the Author Site, which can be changed through your Console account. To enable the Author API based Activity editor, contact our Learnosity support team. Item banks created since 7th October, 2020 have the Author API based Activity editor enabled by default, unless a request is made to the Learnosity Support team to have it disabled. 

Migration guide for enabling the Author API based Activity editor

The Author API based Activity editor converts the underlying Activity JSON format for two things:

1. The UI settings are converted from the deprecated "ui_style" format to a regions based format. The conversion ensures none of the UI settings which were defined in the "ui_style" format are lost, and when converted to the regions based format, the Activity player will have the same UI options as defined earlier. The Activity JSON is also cleaned up to remove the "ui_style" based settings.

2. Item references are converted from an array of strings to an array of objects for Items and resource Items in the Activity JSON. Item references are also converted from string to an array of objects for intro and outro Items in the Activity JSON.

Both conversions happen at runtime when Activities are opened in the Author API, and are transparent to authors. The conversion in Activity JSON is not saved in Learnosity until Authors save the Activity. 

Note: If you are using the Data API endpoints of Get Activities or Set Activities, you need to be aware of the conversion changes and make changes to handle the new Activity JSON format.

Base Templates have been deprecated, and the Get Activity Base Templates end point in Data API is marked for removal in a further LTS. You can instead use the  Get Activity Custom Templates endpoint in Data API to fetch the custom player templates you may have created using Author API.