How do I populate a personalize weblink to specific students using Blackboard?

For anyone interested, Mary Jane and I are doing a little behind the scenes testing.  The design is simple enough - insert the unique key value into an unused user attribute and then pull it out of the user context with a little javascript.   In more detail:

Populating the Data

• Choose an unused user attribute that will be home to your key value (in this case I called it companyKey, because we put a short string of characters into the Company field)
• For sanity and safety, update the GUI so that your attribute is labeled accordingly and can't be updated. You can decide if it is visible or not.  (System Admin -> User Module -> Customize User information)
• Then use the data integration interface of choice (snapshot or framework) to provision your values in the desired field.

Getting it back out

• We can now find our value in the user context here:  ${context.user.company}
• You could certainly use this method to build a set of custom Template Variables.

Some nice to haves left over from another project:

Tracking Use = If you've seen some of the older documentation about Template variables, you might have run across the "launch_external.jsp" page in Learn.  By sending users "through" this page, you can capture these click events in your activity logs.  The page is here: "/webapps/blackboard/launch_external.jsp?"  and it takes the argument "target=(URI encoded url)".  The first part of the code below gets the current location so it can build the link to the launch_external.jsp.

Hiding the value from users - in my previous project, I was a passing a bunch of values that were not particularly sensitive, but I didn't want to expose them to the users. So I used an "on click" type function applied to a custom class (smartLink) to build the link dynamically. I kept it in this example so users wouldn't easily see their Survey ID.

In summary, when a user clicks on a any link with the class of smartLink the code will:

1. Add "/" + company value to the original href
2. Encode the full URL
3. Forward the user to the launch_external.jsp page with #2 as the target value

Example:

Assume my Company value is "ABC123DEF456"...

If I create a link <a class="smartLink" href="https://someplace.youknow.com">Click Here</a>

When the user clicks on the link they will pass through the launch_external.jsp and wind up at https://someplace.youknow.com/ABC123DEF456

The code

if (!window.location.origin) {

  window.location.origin = window.location.protocol + '//' + window.location.hostname + (window.location.port ? (':' + window.location.port) : '');

}

var pathToLaunch = window.location.origin + "/webapps/blackboard/launch_external.jsp?target=";

var companyKey = "${context.user.company}"

var qString = "/" + companyKey;

$$('.smartLink').invoke('observe', 'click', function(event) {

    var el = $(Event.element(event));

    var origAppLink = el.href;

    var newAppLink = origAppLink + qString;

    var fullNewPath = pathToLaunch + encodeURIComponent(newAppLink);

    el.href = "javascript:void(0);";

    window.open(fullNewPath);

    location.reload();

});

Deployment options.

There are several ways you could make the script available for your html input.  Two of them are:

• 1. JSHacks  If you are already using it, or even if you are not, you could implement a hack with this code and then it would be available anywhere you needed it.
• 2. If you're not sure about that method and/or you want a little more control/isolation, you can use a super simple B2 that installs a blackboard portal module.