Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition Configuration Guide

Welcome and thank you for choosing the Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition. The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition is a full SCORM run time environment designed to be easily intgerated into new or exisiting learning management systems.

SCORM 2004 games based learning running in the Icodeon SCORM Player

The Player supports full latest SCORM 2004 Sequencing and Navigation specification to enable advanced adaptive web based learning.

The Icodeon SCORM Player is designed around a set of standards based web services that exchange XML documents with a SCORM run time environment in an Internet Browser.

The player runs in the browser and exchnages XML documents with web services

The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition is distributed as a .zip file

The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition is distributed as a .zip file. Icodeon provide a username and password to download the zip file from the Icodeon website. Once the file is downloaded and unzipped, the following directory structure is seen:

          
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/api/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/config/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/docs/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/legal/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/resx/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/sql/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/src/
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/wwwroot/
          
        

The Icodeon SCORM Player is distributed with a license file. The license file is located at:

          
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/wwwroot/bin/runtime.lic

        

          
Could not validate license "Evaluation Edition (TRY-)" in C:\...\runtime.lic.
...
The trial period has expired.

        

The following SCORM versions are supported:

Summary conformance logs for SCORM 2004 3rd Editon conformance are available for inspection.

The Icodeon SCORM Player will display and sequence IMS Content Packages. The Icodeon Player determines automatically at run time the content type. The correct adapters and behaviours are automatically loaded and no special set up is required by the host LMS.

The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition has been tested on the following browser and operating system combinations:

The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition uses the NHibernate system as a software layer between the application and a relational database. All databases supported by NHibernate are therefore supported by the Icodeon Player. The software distribution comes with SQL and example configuration files for the following databases:

The following Microsoft .NET common language runtime (CLR) versions are supported:

The Icodeon SCORM Player is designed to be deployed to the Microsoft Internet Information (IIS) server. The application has bee tested on the following versions:

The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition web application files are distributed within the directory at:

          
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/wwwroot/

        

          
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/wwwroot/web.config

        

Production deployment essentially follows the same steps as the default deployment described above, with two important differences. Firstly, most production deployments will want to set up relational database persistence. Secondly, there are a nummer of small changes that need to be made to promote a secure deployment. The steps are:

The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition uses the NHibernate library to manage persistence of instances of business object classes to a relational database. The Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition therefore supports all databases supported by NHibernate. In the Icodeon software distribution, SQL and example configuration files are included for MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server (2000 and 2005).

The software distribution comes with SQL for generating required database tables. Each table is prefixed with three characters that are used for the Icodeon namespace ("ICN") to distinguish Player tables from any exisiting host LMS tables. The SQL files can be found in the directory:

          
          [PARENT DIRECTORY]/sql/
           
        

          
alter table ICN_ATTEMPT_PROGRESS_INFO  drop foreign key FKE551D07EEC46D115;
...
drop table if exists ICN_ATTEMPT_PROGRESS_INFO;
           
        

The database schema inherits semantics from the specifications used within the SCORM 2004 specification. In particular, the table names and field names are based on the following specifications: IMS Simple Sequencing IMS Content Packaging Computer Managed Instruction (CMI) Data Model

For further details of the database schema, and examples of report queries, please see the accompanying document schema.html

The Icodeon SCORM Player supports an extensible architecture for persistence: it is possible to "plug-in" different persistence strategies. The distribution comes with two strategies:

Default and custom plug-in persistence strategies for the CMI tracking service

To enable the default "plug-in" for persistence to a relational database through the NHibernate layer, it is necessary to ensure the correct factory classes are specified. Using the file system, navigate to the "wwwroot" directory distributed with the Icodeon SCORM Player and open up the "web.config" configuration file using an XML editor. Edit the entries for persistence factory classes. These classes are "plug-ins" that enable different persistence strategies to be supported. For NHibernate based persistence, set the following values:

          
<add key="CMIPersistenceFactory" 
  value="Icodeon.Services.Cmi.DAO.Hibernate.PersistenceFactoryImpl"/>  
...
<add key="SSPersistenceFactory"
  value="Icodeon.Services.SS.DAO.Hibernate.PersistenceFactoryImpl"/>

        

The NHibernate system uses XML configuration files (typically with file extension "myfilename.cfg.xml") to pass various parameter values (such as connection strings) to the applications. The software distribution comes with example NHibernate configuration files in a directory located:

          
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/config/
          
        

SCORM content is distributed as compressed .zip file known as a Package Interchange File (PIF). A host learning management system will typically provide some facility for uploading and unzipping these files to a network location. It is the responsibility of the host learning management system to provide the Icodeon SCORM Player with a unique identifer, the "courseID" parameter value, that can be resolved to the location of the unzipped PIF.

The details of exactly how the "courseID" is resolved to the network location of an unzipped PIF is implementation specific. The software is provided with the default implementation and source code. Vendors are free to write their own implementation as a "plug-in" for a vendor specific strategy for resolving the "courseID" parameter value to the the location of the unzipped PIF.

The default implementation relies on a simple strategy of:

The code that implements this strategy is in a class called "ManifestHandlerFactory" and compiled into a library called "Icodeon.Player.Plugins". The class is mapped to a defined handler name called "ManifestResolver" and specified in the web.config configuration file:

              
<system.webServer>
  <handlers>
    ...
      <add name="ManifestResolver" verb="GET" path="ManifestResolver.aspx"
          type="Icodeon.RTE.Handlers.ManifestHandlerFactory, Icodeon.Player.Plugins"/>
    ...
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>
          
        

          
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/config/src/Icodeon/RTE/Handlers
          
        

The process of writing a "plug-in" implementation to relace the default implementation is as follows:

There is a well known issue in SCORM implementations known as the "SCORM Cross-Domain Scripting Issue" that is a variant of the browser "Single Origin" security policy: that scripts from a web page from one domain may not invoke functions of a script on a web page of another domain.

The issue arrises in SCORM implementations as SCORM specifies that a host run time environment (such as the Icodeon SCORM Player) and content objects must establish a communication session through Java Script function calls.

There is ongoing discussion within the community of SCORM implementers concerning this cross-domain scripting issue. Icodeon recommends placing both the Icodeon Player and the Course Content within the same network domain to be the most successful strategy.

Detailed diagnostic information is required to identify the issue for resolution if there are errors reported by the Icodeon Player. To provide vendors and Icodeon with this detailed diagnostic information, use the following steps:

The Icodeon Player makes use of advanced client-side JavaScript classes to manage SCORM behaviour and communication with web services. Errors in client-side behvaiour will not appear in the server side rich error reporting. To provide vendors and Icodeon with this detailed client-side diagnostic information, use the following steps:

From time to time Icodeon issue product updates. Customers will recieve automatic notification from Icodeon Customer Support when a new release is available for download. If the product update is a minor version change (for example, from Verison 2.09 to Version 2.10), then updated application files can normally be copied over an exisiting deployment, with the exception of configuration files and serial numbers, which will need to be back up and restored to the newly copied files:

              
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/wwwroot/web.config
[PARENT DIRECTORY]/wwwroot/serial_number.inf
          
        

The Icodeon SCORM Player makes extensive use of client (browser) side Ajax libraries which may be cached locally in the browser. When testing the product update it is necessary to ensure that browser caches are refreshed to ensure the updated libraries are used by the browser.

This guide provides details for installing and configuring the Icodeon SCORM Player .NET Edition for typical evaluation and production deployments.

The Icodeon SCORM Player provides the vendor with many customization options and extension points at which vendor "plug-ins" can be used to replace the default code provided by Icodeon. For support regarding further customization options and extension points go to http://support.icodeon.com

Support and help with the Icodeon Player

The Icodeon SCORM Player comes with numeroous configuration and customization options. However, sometimes these options provided by Icodeon do not meet the specific needs of a particular vendor.

For further details of the database schema, and examples of report queries, please see the accompanying document plugin.html

The SCORM specification, escpecially SCORM 2004, requires a lot of "state" to be maintained and processed and so there are inherent limits to the performance of SCORM run times.

Note also that the first request to the Icodeon SCORM Player, like all ASP.NET applications is atypical - there are application start up events associated with the first request that make this (once only) request slower than subsequent requests.

However, there are a number of configuration and deployment options that can be used to tune/optimize the performance of the Icodeon SCORM Player.

The Icodeon SCORM Player uses the Hibernate Object/Relational layer for persistence. At start-up this layer generates required SQL statements and caches them for use later at run-time. The following property can be added to the Hibernate configuration files that gives slower applicatio start-up (a one time event) but faster run time behaviour:

          
    <!-- Optimizer is slower on initialization, but faster when running -->
    <property name="hibernate.use_reflection_optimizer">true</property>

        

When the Icodeon Player is launched, the mandatory parameter called:

          
          courseID

        

          
          orgID

        

When the Icodeon SCORM Player is launched, the manifest file for the particular SCORM package is read in and parsed. To avoid repeated reads of the same manifest file, the Player is configured to cache the file for faster reuse. Cache behavior is dependent on where the Icodeon SCORM Player reads the manifest file from: either from a directory that is below the root directory of the Player application, or from a different virtual directory in the same domain.