Introduction to Activity Providers

An activity provider is a program that send xAPI data into Watershed. Most activity providers use Basic Authentication to connect to the LRS (Watershed), if you Activity Provider uses OAuth 2 then please refer to the help article Activity Providers and OAuth.

Creating an Activity Provider

In order to allow the Activity provider to send Watershed data, follow these steps:

1. Go to the xAPI Data section of the Data page.
2. In the Activity Providers section, click the Add Activity Provider button:
3. A new Unnamed Provider will be added to your account. Use the information to the right of the new Unnamed Provider to send data to Watershed:
   • Name: Click Edit to change the name. Use something that will help you remember what activity provider you're setting up in case you ever need to turn off the connection. Click the Save button after you've changed the name.
   • Key: This will typically be the username/app ID.
   • Secret: This is typically the password. 
   • LRS Access. There are 5 options here, the default state is "isolated" and you should normally keep it this way.
     
     • Disabled. This disabled the activity provider without removing it from Watershed.
     • Isolated. Isolated activity providers allow activity providers to write data to Watershed, and retrieve data sent by the same credentials.
     • Global. Same as isolated, but the activity provider can read all data contained inside Watershed not just the data that it wrote.
     • Global read only. Allows the activity provider to read all data inside Watershed.
     • Write only. Allows the activity provider to only write data to Watershed.
   • API Access: The default state is "disabled", and you should probably keep it this way. By keeping API Access disabled, you're ensuring that the credentials cannot be used to access Watershed's API as a Watershed global admin user. Only enable API Access when you really know what you are doing, and keep credentials with API Access extra secure.  
   • Active: The default state is “Active”, and you should keep it that way. If you ever decide that this activity provider can’t be trusted, then you can disable it here and no further statements will be accepted from it.
4. Send statements to Watershed using the Endpoint/Key/Secret.

Activity provider limits

Watershed allows xAPI activity providers to send up to 3000 requests a minute (this includes statements as well as any other API requests). If you exceed this limit, Watershed will rate limit the activity provider and send any additional xAPI statements to a queue which will be processed once the statement request rate has dropped.

Setup an OAuth Activity Provider

If your Activity Provider uses OAuth then please refer to the help article Activity Providers and OAuth.