Publish Awards

Certificate and Statement of Attainment awards can be published to your website along with a QR Code on each award for self verification.

Published location

The awards can be published on your existing website without any special integration required. At minimum you will ensure that the published pages match the theme on the rest of your website, and contain a link (by clicking your logo perhaps) to your home page.

You can locate the awards either in a folder or a sub-domain. Some examples for the fictional https://example.com/ are:

• https://example.com/award/published-id/

• https://example.com/verify/published-id/

• https://award.example.com/published-id/

• https://verify.example.com/published-id/

Award template

For an award to be published it's template must contain a {Publish As} command and one of the PDF commands:

• {Publish As} type-of-award {End Publish}

• {Save As PDF}

• {Save As Secure PDF} password {End Save}

To give the PDF a nice name, use the {Save As} command, for example:

• {Save As}Certificate {Certifcate Number} issued {Event Date} to {Student Full Name} for {Course Name} ({Course Code}){End Save}

The published location is available in the template via the {Published URL] field, for example:

• {QR Code '2cm'}{Published URL}{End QR Code}

• Verify at {Published URL}

The published website will have access to details about the award. Icare will publish a default set of details, those details can be adjusted with optional commands:

• {Publish Student} student-name-sentence {End Publish}

• {Publish Student = student-field }

• {Publish Course Code} course-code-sentence {End Publish}

• {Publish Course Code = course-code-field }

• {Publish Course Name} course-name-sentence {End Publish}

• {Publish Course Name = course-name-field }

• {Publish Course = course-field }

• {Publish No Course}

• {Publish No Modules}

• {Publish No Module Codes}

• {Publish Issued} issued-date-sentence {End Publish}

• {Publish Issued = issued-date-field }

• {Publish Number} number-sentence {End Publish}

• {Publish Number = number-field }

• {Publish Title} title-sentence {End Publish}

• {Publish Title = title-field }

Settings

You need to inform Icare of the publishing location by filling in the Management → Award Publish Settings page:

Enabled?

Tick this to enable publishing of awards

URL

Enter the base location for awards to be published. For example, entering a URL of https://verify.example.com/ will get awards published at locations https://verify.example.com/published-id

Secret

Enter the secret (password) that Icare must provide to the website to prove that it is authorised to publish.

Published ID

When Icare publishes an award it generates a published ID, a random ID selected from a large pool of IDs. Even though the awards are essentially public documents, generating IDs in this way makes it hard for published awards to be browsed. For example, a student receiving an award published at 1005 cannot simply look at 1004 to see the previously issued ward.

By default the ID made up of six characters, each character a digit or lower case alpha character. Excluding i, l, o & u to avoid confusion leaves 32 characters. This pool of IDs contains about one billion entries, 32 to the power of 6.

Publish Method

Icare publishes an award by making a POST request to the URL in the settings. The request will contain a multipart/form-data encoded body with the following fields:

secret

from settings,

replace

yes or no,

as

from the {Publish As} command,

slug

the published ID,

title

from the {Publish Title} command,

student

issued

number

course_code

course_name

module_code[]

module_name[]

The response should be one of:

• a 2xx status code to represent success,

• a 409 status code to indicate that another award already exists at the published ID (slug). NOTE: if the replace field was yes then the award should be replaced and a 2xx status code returned.

• other status codes should contain a textual body with an error message per line.