Wytheville Community College Blackboard Quiz Generator

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Before getting too far, read the note at the bottom of the page:

In Blackboard 4.x a.k.a. CourseInfo 4.x, you had pretty urls, like this:

http://blackboard.ourcollege.edu/courses/courseid/

Very nice.

Those went away in Blackboard 5, but there is a way to get them back without modifying any Blackboard code. Standard disclaimers apply. Since this is purely an add-on to our server, it doesn't violate the license agreement as best I can tell (IANAL).

This is a Windows IIS solution. You could accomplish the same thing in *nix using Apache Rewrite Rules.

The general strategy is to set up a custom 404 handler that queries the BB50 database for the course id and then redirects to the right location using the primary and secondary keys of the course entry.

The code I use is here:

• courses.txt
• getData.txt

There is some commentary in the files about how they are to be set up and used, but initially you do two things:

1. Put the files somewhere on your server
2. Rename courses.txt to courses.asp
3. Customize the DSN line for your server in getData.txt

After customizing them for your site, you set up IIS to use the courses.asp file as a 404 handler. This must be done using the url option in the Custom Error messages section of the site's properties.

That should do it.

Note: this seems to work with guest access, but no guarantees, e.g.

http://blackboard.wcc.vccs.edu/courses/bb101

Trailing slash is optional. Then click the preview button.

David: On that page you state that the "friendly" URLs went away in Blackboard 5. This isn't really true; there's merely an added component to the URL. The "friendly" URL format for Blackboard 5 is this:

http://blackboard.server.ocm/courses/1/courseid/

I found about this from one of the Knowledge Base articles on the Blackboard support site. On my server, the "1" is always "1" -- I think this might be different in certain Level III servers situations, but I don't know for certain. Check the /usr/local/blackboard/docs/ (or equiv) directory to be certain... the "docs" is the Server Root of the installation.

Hope this helps,
Jeremy

Jeremy P. Portzer
Instructional Web Server Administrator
Durham Technical Community College

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David Carter-Tod
Wytheville Community College