Developer Groups, Site Quotas, and Rate Limits

In This Document

Overview

With the Blackboard Developer Portal, you can manage use of your Learn instance's REST APIs and applications that use those APIs. Groups of developers work on one or more applications and each group is subject to a limit on the number of sites that can use their applications and the number of API requests their applications can make daily.

Developer Groups

You manage control of an application using developer groups.

When you create your login on the developer portal, you also create a group of one that includes only yourself and is named after you. You can create more groups on the My Groups page. You can add other registered users to your groups.

When you create an application, you assign it to a group, and members of that group can access it.

Before moving to production, you must designate one group as the production group. The best practice is to name your production group after your organization. See the Group Naming Requirements in this document for further details.

Each developer group is subject to maximum site quotas and to daily limits on the number of API requests made. These limits start relatively low because they are intended for development and testing only. To qualify for production-level site quotas and rate limits, you must designate a production group. To designate one of your groups as a production follow the steps provided at the end of this document.

For more information about using, managing, and naming groups, see https://community.blackboard.com/docs/DOC-3336-developer-portal-and-groups

Production Groups

To move into production and allow your application to be used more widely, you must create a production group. A developer group is designated as a production group when you name it after your company using initial upper-case camel case, e.g., YourCompanyName. The production group name identifies your REST application to the Learn administrator when they install your application.

Site Quotas

Each developer group has a quota of the maximum number of Blackboard Learn sites that can access the group's applications, regardless of number of applications.

You are responsible for keeping track of the sites where your Learn REST Application is installed.

If a client attempts to install your REST application but the site quota is exceeded for the developer group that manages it, the client will get an error message when they try to install it. The error message typically reads something like Failure: Application developer has exceeded maximum number of client installations. Please contact the developer.

Rate Limits

A rate limit is the number of API requests that can come each day from applications that are registered to your developer group. For example, if you have a 100K limit and three applications, each application will use a portion of that 100K limit.

You can monitor the number of requests used so far at an application level using the http headers provided in each request response.

Increasing Site Quota and Rate Limits

If you are a Blackboard partner or licensed client when you need to increase the site quota and rate limit for your production group, please open a ticket on Behind the Blackboard. Provide the following in your request:

• Production group name. Designate one of your groups as a production group if you haven’t. Tell us the name here.

• Developer email that owns the production group.

• A description of the application, both what it does and which APIs used.

If you are an open-initiative developer please make your request by email to developers@blackboard.com. In your request, provide the same information as indicated above.