Developer Area/Import//Export/Interoperability/EProgress File (KS4)

The Leicestershire e-PF/ILP project was one of the Portfolio Interoperability Project members.

Quick Summary

eProgress File/Mahara interoperability is very poor. Interoperability was last tested on 2009/09/10.

Mahara could possibly import some of eProgress File's information into the resume, but because they are exporting with incorrect namespace information, everything is being imported into the miscellaneous blog.

eProgress File haven not yet provided an importer, so whether Mahara exports can be imported by them is unknown.

Import

eProgress File has provided a web service for exporting XML files. We've seen nothing in their example export that suggests they include any kind of out-of-line content, and as such they don't have an exporter that produces .zip files.

Attached to this page is an example export from their webservice. You can generate your own by visiting their PIOP page and following the instructions.

Currently, Mahara can parse their file successfully, but is unable to suggest any decent strategies to handle any of the elements inside it - mainly because the namespaces they have declared are not valid Leap2A namespaces. Therefore, everything is imported into the catch-all blog. They have spelt 'categories' wrong in the tag, and declared incorrect namespaces for xmlns:leap, xmlns:leaptype and xmlns:categories (the latter of which has the incorrect 'catagories' spelling).

Their import file has one entry of type leaptype:person. It is our assumption that this is meant to represent the person whom the export is for, in which case it should be linked to using the element of the feed-level element. In addition, it declares the category person_type#self, but the 'self' should be 'Self' (case sensitive), so Mahara does not pick it up as being the persondata element for them either.

For the other entries, almost everwhere (except for Personalstatement) they have spelt the terms in all lower-case, which is incorrect. One entry has the selection_type of "career_plan", which is not a valid selection type for the Leap2A spec.

The attached file leap2a_maharafixes.xml, is a version of their export file with these problems fixed. leap2a_maharafixes.diff is a diff of the changes.

After these changes are made, Mahara can successfully import the person entry, the personal statement and some of the resume entries, although the vast majority of content still ends up in the catch-all blog.

At least one entry in the file - portfolio:my_learning_styles - contains two rdf:type tags.

Export

eProgress File have not publicly provided an importer as of 2009/09/10, so whether Mahara files can be exported to them is unknown.

Files

• File:Leap2a (1).xml
• File:Leap2a maharafixes (1).diff
• File:Leap2a maharafixes (1).xml