Creating Links to Individual Mallard Utilities

Why would I ever need to link to individual Mallard utilities?

The short answer is, it's one way to further customize Mallard for your particular needs. Perhaps you would like to use Mallard, but you don't need all of its utilities. You might like to offer quizzes to your students and let them see their grades, but have no use for Mallard announcements. You might not be using the Course Gradebook, and worry that students might be confused by the link to it on the usual Mallard home page. Perhaps you already have your own course homepage with many other informational links on it, and would prefer to build access to Mallard quizzes into your existing course pages. Or maybe you just don't like the layout of the standard Mallard home page. All of these are reasons you might prefer to create your own page for students with separate links to individual Mallard utilities rather than directing them to a standard Mallard course home page URL.

What will the individual links look like?

The individual links you will create are standard HREF links in HTML which simply point to individual Mallard CGI programs. You can choose any wording or image you like for the links.

Okay, so what are the links to some common utilities?

The links given below are written for a course named XXX on a server at URL https://www.mallard.edu/. You will need to customize those values for your own server and course name. Again, you can use whatever text or images you like between these <A HREF=...> tags and their </A> closing tags.

Why can't I link to a single lesson other than the "current lesson?"

Individual lessons are constructs which only make sense in terms of the lessons page. They are not separate files stored on the disk but only ordered clumps of tags inside the one lessons page file. In fact, you CAN link to the Nth individual lesson on the lessons page, like this: 

      <A HREF='https://www.mallard.edu/XXX/lesson.cgi&lesson=N'>
However, when groups are used on the lessons page, it is not always immediately obvious which lesson is in a given position. Furthermore, each time you edit the order of the lessons page, the actual lesson being linked to will change. For these reasons, it is safest to link to each individual quiz, link to the entire lessons page, or link to the current lesson (the current lesson code dynamically checks the student's grades and all of the due dates to determine the correct current lesson for that student).

Linking to the current lesson can be risky as well. Recall that the current lesson means "lesson with the earliest duedate that has not yet passed, that the student has not yet completed." This means that if a student neglects to complete a lesson on time, that lesson will never be reachable from a current lesson link, even if it is still possible to get some points for the lesson.

But can't anybody access these links? How are the students authenticated if they don't go to the Mallard home page?

Unless the page on which you are putting the individual Mallard links is itself password restricted, anyone will be able to access that page and see the links to Mallard utilities which you've created, along with any other content you may have provided on the page. However, Mallard user authentication (the process wherein students type in their username and password, and let Mallard know who they are) does not only happen when users access the standard Mallard home page. In fact, every individual Mallard program performs an authentication check and restricts its access to valid users.

The first Mallard page that a user accesses will force the user to type in a valid username and password. This first Mallard page may be any Mallard utility at all - perhaps a quiz, announcements, or the lessons page. Upon successful authentication, Mallard permits the student to access the page in the usual manner and gives the browser a secure cookie to be presented when further Mallard pages are accessed. As long as this cookie exists and has not expired, Mallard will not prompt the user to enter her username and password when visiting Mallard pages. This is the exact same situation as when students access Mallard through the usual Mallard home page - in that case, the main Mallard page is the first page students access, and so it is that page which prompts them for the initial authentication.

If anyone not in your Mallard course clicks on the individual Mallard links you have provided, they will be asked at that point for their username and password. As they do not have a valid username and password, they will be denied access.

Note that the secure cookies will remain valid until one of the following occurs:

It is important to provide a link to the logout utility, particularly for students who may be using public access computer sites. If one student works in Mallard for a while and then gets up and leaves without either logging out or quitting the browser, she has left a valid cookie sitting in the browser. If another student then comes along within 60 minutes and begins work in Mallard, that cookie is still valid and so he will not be asked to authenticate - instead, Mallard will assume that he is actually the first student! Any grades obtained on Mallard quizzes by this second student will then end up recorded under the first student's name. Students do not always exit the browser when they leave the lab!

Where do I go to perform development or course administrative tasks?

Any page you provide with links to individual Mallard utilities is only a different means of reaching utilities that are part of a standard Mallard course. The usual Mallard course home page still exists, reachable at its usual URL. You will go there to run the non-student Mallard programs, just as you would normally. Incidentally, the course is created and the rosters maintained in the same manner as any other Mallard course.

Should they choose to, students may also access the Mallard utilities in the usual manner through the regular Mallard course home page if they happen to guess the URL. If your custom page is providing full access to all utilities they need, however, they generally will not bother trying to guess another way in.

I'd like to use the standard Mallard icons for my links, but would like to put them on my own custom page. Can I do that?

You may indeed. However, because your custom page is not located under the document root on the Mallard server, you will need to save copies of the icons on the server where your custom page is, in the same location as any other images you might be using on your page.

We have provided a page displaying the icons currently used in Mallard for your perusal. Go to this page and save those icons you wish to use. (For most browsers, this means right-clicking on the image and filling in the resulting dialog box.) When creating your page, refer to these newly saved images by the filenames and locations you have given them on your system.

We do respectfully ask that you not use the Mallard icons for purposes other than linking to Mallard utilities.

Is there a way to make the announcements icon on my page change to "new" when there are unread announcements?

Not at present. However we may be providing a special link (with the image dynamically generated by a short program on the Mallard server) to allow this in the future. Stay tuned.

How about some examples?

The following are some links to utilities on the Mallard demo site (main home page URL: https://mallard.scale.uiuc.edu/Demo/). As explained above, you will be prompted for a username and password when you click on these links. The correct values are:

username: demo/mallard
password: student

Here they are:

Questions? Comments? General harrassment? Mail it to maiko@wocket.csl.uiuc.edu.