Web - Vendor Management with RAP and One Roster via Postman v2

Updated: 26/7/24

The SIMS ID web APIs for RAP (our standard) and One Roster(IMS global standard) are simple ways to get a small but sufficient for many purposes lightweight data from SIMS for use in applications such as learning platforms.

Our preferred route  is to use related APIs to get the data that you need to access the school's data from school's who grant access to your application, known as 'Vendor Management APIs' which saves the provider from asking the school to provide their credentials manually.  Schools can withdraw access easily too if the need arises.

Vendor management needs you to:

• Log in to SIMS ID as a technical integrator to:
  • Obtain your vendor management client id and secret
  • Obtain your application id 
• Obtain a JWT[Vendor] to enable access
  • This uses the client id and secret above (example in postman below)
• Obtain a list of all of the customers using your application
  • This uses the JWT[Vendor] and application id to get the list of schools granting access.
  • (example in postman below)
• For each school in your list (or subset thereof)
  • Obtain the client id, organisation id and secret to enable you to access data from the school using One Roster / RAP APIs.
  • (example in postman below)

Once you have a client ID, Org ID and secret for a school, you can the request data.  There are alternative manual ways to obtain the credentials if for some reason this model won't work for you but these involve the school or provider using SIMS ID to manually harvest them.

• Request a JWT[School] for each school in turn
• Request data from RAP APIs using the JWT[School] token
• Request data from One Roster using the JWT[School] token

 All of the authentication uses an OAuth2 client credential model.

To demonstrate this we provide a sandbox and postman artefacts below which include sample vendor management credentials, a demo school authorised for a demo application. 

Environment

sims-partners.com/Postman/OR-RAP/July24/Env (Opens in a browser)

Collection

sims-partners.com/Postman/OR-RAP/July24/Collection (Opens in a browser)

ZIP

https://www.sims-partners.com/Postman/OR-RAP/July24/Zip (Downloads)

Please download the Postman files above.  If you do not have Postman then please visit www.getpostman.com.  This is a product owned externally and subject to their licensing agreement and may incur charges.

Within postman please import both of the above.

Set the Environment to vmc Version 2.

Locate the collection VMC Version 2.

1. Execute VM Token Request to get a vendor management JWT.

2. Execute VM Get Schools for application to get a list of schools using the sample application.

3. Execute VMC Get Credentials which gets the credentials for the first school returned (client id and secret)

4. Execute School Token Request to get a JWT to enable access to the first school's data.

5. Execute RAP Students to  get an example of student data using the JWT

6. Execute OneRoster Students - to get an example of students using the JWT

See Web - SIMS ID Based APIs | ESS Portal (sims-partners.com) for examples and documentation.

This covers most of the basis - it is then a case of deciding whether the data is sufficient for the application needs.