Question
I am accustomed to seeing my debug logs by session on the Sandbox page and the Launch History when viewing my SCORM courses in the SCORM Cloud, why are no debug logs showing up for my xAPI courses? What tools do you have to troubleshoot xAPI courses?
Answer
SCORM Cloud's Launch history, as it lives today, is focused around the SCORM API calls that are made by the content. Because the SCORM API is part of the SCORM player we have an opportunity to record those calls at the time they happen and format them into a readable log. For xAPI there is no player. This is a boon for content creators because it gives them far more freedom with their content than SCORM did but it has some limitations for this type of debug logging.
Those limitations are primarily caused by the lack of a player for xAPI content. xAPI content exists in the browser outside of a player and sends statements back to some endpoint via existing http protocols which can't be intercepted.
What this means is that you have two "views" of what might be considered launch history:
1) Statement Viewer - Statement Viewer in SCORM Cloud can show you all of the statements related to a registration. This represents all of the communication between the content and the ScormEngine that was successfully saved. The only exception for this would be the state (replacement of suspend data) data which we only save the most recent value and don't display in the statement viewer.
2) Browser Debug tools - Obviously these tools are only going to be useful when you're testing a course live but they will provide more information than the statement viewer. Because all communication in xAPI will be handles by simple HTTP POSTS, PUTS and GETS you should be able to see all the successful and unsuccessful API calls including Statements and State."