Inbound LRS Data

Inbound LRS Data enables you to connect to another Learning Record Store (LRS) to automatically pull in learner interaction data in real time. This is useful if you have another learning record store that you need to migrate data from, or if you need to maintain an ongoing connection as part of your learning ecosystem. This feature works with other Watershed accounts and any LRS that conforms to xAPI. Here's a full list of conformant LRSs, and this feature may also work with LRSs that are not fully conformant.

Setup an Inbound LRS

Most LRSs will use basic authentication to control access to its data, if your connection uses OAuth 2 please see the help article Inbound LRS data and OAuth.

Go to the Data page. In the menu on the left, click xAPI Data Sources. Inbound LRS Data is the 2nd section down: 

Set Up The Connection

1. Go to the Inbound Data section and click the and the Add Inbound Data Source button:
2. Using data from the outside LRS, fill out the fields. Different LRSs call these different things:
   • Name: Name this something that will help you remember what it is.
   • Endpoint: Paste in the endpoint URL from the LRS that you’d like to pull statements from.
   • Key: Paste in the Key/username from the LRS that you’d like to pull statements from. Please note: this is probably not the username you use to log in to the LRS.
   • Secret: Paste in the secret/password from the LRS that you’d like to pull statements from. Please note: this is probably not the password you use to log in to the LRS.
   • OAuth: Not required for basic authentication.
   • Last timestamp: select a timestamp that you want to pull statements after that time. 
3. Click the Save button. All old statements from the other LRS should show up in your Data Search and so should any future statements made in the other LRS. If you don’t see any imported statements within 15 minutes, you should check your configuration and make sure everything was entered correctly.

Setup an Inbound LRS using OAuth

To setup an Inbound LRS connection with OAuth please go to the help article Inbound LRS data and OAuth.

Debugging Errors

Watershed strictly validates data to protect you from bad data that could otherwise lead to misleading or broken reports. This validation is also a requirement of all conformant xAPI LRSs, so in theory any data coming from another LRS should also be valid, but in practice we do sometimes still see invalid data in other LRSs.

When Watershed receives a bad xAPI statement, it will skip over the bad statement and record it in a skipped statement log. This will be shown in red text as shown below. You can check that log by clicking See details.

This brings up a list of skipped statements and the beginning of the error message for that statement.

You can click on each row of the table to see the full error message and the full xAPI statement that generated the error. You can then use this information to identify the source of the issue and address it.

Resetting The Connection

If you need to reset the connection for any reason, just edit the Last Timestamp to an earlier time past the point that you need to pull in statements from. To re-run all the data, set the Last Timestamp to a date before any of your data was stored, or 2010 (before xAPI existed). Don't worry about importing the same xAPI statements twice; they won't be duplicated (although the number of statements recieved shown on the Inbound LRS record will increase).