Blackboard LTI Payload Does Not Include lis_result_sourcedid

Problem:
When examining an LTI payload created by Blackboard with outcomes or scoring enabled. The POST LTI payload has an lis_outcome_service_url but no lis_result_sourcedid.

Solution:
This one is a silly one that has got me a time or two before. What I have found is that the user launching the LTI activity does not have a Student role in the class.

.NETcore on Bitbucket pipeline error: A compatible SDK version for global.json version not found

Problem

We successfully moved to continuous integration earlier this year and are working on setting up our development with a continuous deployment. To run our tests on every pull request, we wanted a pipeline step that would ensure all our tests passed. The project is on .NET core v2.2.

At first, I tried the default configuration using microsoft/dotnet:sdk but ran into the following issue:

A compatible SDK version for global.json version: [2.2.101] from [/opt/atlassian/pipelines/agent/build/Project/global.json] was not found
Did you mean to run dotnet SDK commands? Please install dotnet SDK from:
  https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=798306&clcid=0x409

After researching this a bit, it finally dawned on us that there was an incompatibility between our global.json defined version and the SDK version available in the Docker image.


Solution

It turned out we needed to ensure that our global.json version had to match the SDK version available. In our case, we determined we no longer needed the global.json file and removed it.


For reference, here is what our pipeline configuration looked like:

bitbucket-pipelines.yml

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        name: Build and Run Back-End Unit Tests
        image: mcr.microsoft.com/dotnet/core/sdk:2.2
        caches:
          - dotnetcore
        script:
          - cd Project/
          - dotnet restore
          - dotnet build ProjectService --no-restore
          - dotnet test ProjectService_Tests --no-build --no-restore

Defold: Using Tint to Reduce sprite count

Problem:

I'm new to Defold but it's coming along. I am working on a hex tile game and I wanted to have different tiles represent sand, grass, and water. After updating my atlas file to include each tile graphic, I created a tile game object with logic to show or hide each sprite based on the passed in type.

Generating smaller maps I soon realized this was not going to work. Each tile game object had multiple sprites on it, and even though some were not visible, they still counted. In addition, any sprite decorations inside the tiles, but only showing up ever on one tile also counted.

Solution: 

After playing around with the tint feature, I realized I could probably tint something white to be any color I wanted and anything dark or grey would still be visible (which is good because my tiles need outlines and I'm not going to build a shader for that...).

It worked really well. For each tile script I store the colors of each state, and tint the tile when I need it to change.

local water_color = vmath.vector4(.33, .66, 1, 1)
local sand_color = vmath.vector4(.99, .96, .62, 1)
local grass_color = vmath.vector4(.55, .79, 0, 1)

sprite.set_constant("#skin", "tint", grass_color)

Also, move any tile decorators outside the tile, make the tiles as simple as possible and that will help optimize your game.

No valid kits found. : Qt Creator on Windows

Problem:

While starting again on another python project and wanting to use Qt Creator to create a quick GUI, I was confused when things didn't go quite as planned. When creating a new Qt Widgets application, I got to a second step of Kit Selection but found a message reading:

No valid kits found. 


Solution: 

Once I installed the Windows SDK (debug utilities specifically) and rebooted my computer, Qt Creator was able to find the default kit profile.

C# Azure WebJobs - Functions Ending with Async Don't Run

Problem:
While trying to debug some new WebJobs that were running, I decided to implement the process of elimination to see what made certain job definitions not run. Here is the method, that would not run.

public static void PurgeOldRecordsAsync([TimerTrigger("0 * * * * *")] TimerInfo timerInfo, ILogger log)
{
     await helper.RunTaskAsync(); 
}

In the process of elimination, I simplified the function content to just print to the log when it ran. Also, I tried replacing the async Task portion the function with a void return. Neither changed anything. Then I tried changing the name of the function to TestJob and it ran. So I determined it had something to do with the name...

Solution
It turns out that any function name ending in Async wouldn't run. Once I removed this from the function name, the job triggered as expected.

I searched the web, but couldn't find a reason for this. If you know, please share in the comments.

error TS5014: Failed to parse file

Problem:
Working on rebuilding my js files from Typescript src files, I went to run tsc and found this issue.

$ tsc -p tsconfig.json

error TS5014: Failed to parse file 'tsconfig.json/tsconfig.json': Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0.


Solution:
Turns out this was due to not having typescript installed properly on WSL (where I was running the compiler command).

$ npm i -g typescript
$ tsc -p tsconfig.json

By first installing typescript, I was able to properly compile my code.

Initially, I had thought this might be related to using WSL in conjunction with Windows to develop. However, this was not the case. You can read my previous post to see issues related to WSL and Windows cross development.

Nodejs Development - WSL and Windows: Unknown error lstat, errno 4094

I really like Linux and MacOS over Windows. The commands and syntax feel more comfortable, the tooling more reliable (IMO), probably because I've managed Linux servers for some time. So, you can imagine how excited I was to see WSL or Windows Subsystem Linux.

Problem: 
Switching between WSL Ubuntu terminal and Windows command line, I've found some various issues. More recently, however, I came across this one while trying to run a simple script:

{ Error: UNKNOWN: unknown error, lstat 'C:\project_path\node_modules\.bin\eslint'
  errno: -4094,
  code: 'UNKNOWN',
  syscall: 'lstat',
  path: 'C:\\project_path\\node_modules\\.bin\\eslint' }


Solution:
In my case, the problem has to do with how npm is connecting dependency scripts to my project. In WSL, npm uses symbolic links to create an alias to something located somewhere else; in our case the scripts for these programs are actually nested deeper in the node_modules directory. To allow our program to use them easily, npm creates aliases in the node_modules/.bin directory. However, in Windows, npm creates a bunch of cmd files, which more or less do the same thing, by running the script where it actually resides; deeper in the node_modules/ directory.

To figure this out, I decided to let the operating systems each tell me what it saw in the .bin/ directory (I had run npm install on WSL prior):

On WSL (using ls -l)
eslint -> ../eslint/bin/eslint.js

On Windows (using attrib)
The target of the symbolic link C:\project_path\node_modules\.bin\eslint does not exist

If you want to develop node applications, then you either need to use npm on WSL or Windows, but not both. As my IDE is a Windows application and has built in script execution, I guess I will need to do all my npm management on Windows.

To fix this issue, the easiest/clean solution is to completely remove node_modules/ (verify it is removed on both Windows and WSL!) and then on your chosen operating system (Windows for me), run your npm install command.

LTI Signature Fails - Carriage Returns, Newlines, and OAuth Signatures

Problem: 

While writing an LTI integration tool, I decided to run a battery of true LTI payloads from various LMS systems and see if I could produce the same signature. While running these payloads via automation, I found that some payloads would fail to produce the same signature. After ensuring that my encoding was using the agreed standard RFC 3986, I looked to narrow in on a specific LMS like Moodle or Blackboard. The signature fails were not confined to a specific LMS, but rather all contained the same single non-visible character.


Solution:

The payloads failing to produce a correct signature happened to contain a carriage return (\r) followed by a new line(\n). The \r\n line termination sequence is commonly used by Microsoft. Suspicious of the carriage return, I removed it from the payloads, then reprocessed the signatures. It was successful. So now understanding what caused the problem, I decided to narrow in to the why.

LTI Flow Inner Workings (The Quick Version)
The LTI flow originates from the LMS also known as the Tool Consumer (TC), the TC will generate a payload of data consisting of key/value pairs and then sign the data using a shared secret. This signature uses OAuth. Once the data has been created it is generally injected into a user's browser page inside a form element of type POST and an action pointing to the Tool Provider's (TP) endpoint. Once this data is in the form, it will be submitted either automatically or manually. The recipient, which is the TP, takes this payload of data and verifies the data has not been changed by using the shared secret to recreate the signature. If the signature matches the one provided, the data can be trusted.

Dirty Little Microsoft Browser
The problem we see is probably a result of the browser attempting to format the data as it is injected into the form and newlines are preceded by a carriage return. This actually makes sense if the browser is going to display the data to the user, as Windows uses these carriage returns.

At some point, it appears that the issue was corrected for Edge, but current LTI payloads make me suspect that it is still an issue. (See: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/16221536/)

Coding Defensively
Unfortunately, we can't just always remove carriage returns prior to signing our payload. This is because a lot of data in the payload is, in fact, entered by an user who might be using a browser that uses carriage returns. In this case, the data will most likely be signed with the carriage returns in place as few implementations clean up these returns prior to signing (but probably should).

In order to handle these carriage return injections, we are going to have to check both possibilities when evaluating the signature. First, we assume that the data provided is correct for signing. The payloads may not contain carriage returns, may have been signed with the carriage returns, or there might not be any newlines at all. If this fails, we second try to remove only carriage returns that are immediately followed by a newline character.